Eris and Aurora
by LedaTreize
Summary: "Godsdamn Kara Thrace. Who is this woman? Discord herself?" Three Adama men, and the woman at the heart of their conflicts, at the end of the world.
1. Chapter 1

**Title**: Eris and Aurora, 1/5

**Length**: 6,000 words, roughly, this part.

**Rating**: PG, language and concepts. Will be M and NC-17 in later parts.

**Characters**: Kara, Lee, Adama as foci. Will be K/L later.

**Notes**: AU, begins during the mini-series. Occasional back story flashbacks. No spoilers for anything beyond the mini-series at this point. All time references refer to the Cylon Attack on the colonies as 0 hour; time will be referred to a positive or negative reference to that date.

**Summary**: "Godsdamn Kara Thrace. Who is this woman? Discord herself?" Three Adama men, and the woman at the heart of their conflicts.

**-3 years**

_"Lieutenant Thrace: for what reason did you fail Cadet Adama during his basic flight qualifications test?"_

_"I failed him because he failed, sir."_

_"He failed? Could you be more specific?"_

_The pilot-instructor stood at attention, her eyes fixed on a spot on the wall. There were shadows under her eyes that spoke pain or lack of sleep or both, and with skin so fair as hers, they stood out, great bruised marks. Her hair, that eye-catching silver-blonde mop, was scraped back off her face, but curled, darker and dampened, at the back of her neck. "Yes, sir. He failed to correctly perform three of the five required maneuvers, sir. That's an automatic failure."_

_"Lieutenant, why were you romantically involved with one of your students?"_

_The pilot-instructor bit her lip, and for a moment, fire flashed in her gaze. "With all due respect, Colonel -"_

_"Answer the question, Starbuck."_

_She paused, swallowed. Her eyes went back to the wall. "We became involved more than fourteen months before he became one of my students, sir. It wasn't contrary to regulations."_

_"And when it became obvious that he would be one of your nuggets, you didn't end it?"_

_The young woman bit her lip. "It was too late for that, sir."_

_There was a little silence. Then finally the major drummed his fingers on the bench. "Lieutenant Thrace, was your relationship with Cadet Adama continuing, at the time of his flight test?"_

_She stared at the wall. Her body stiffened, and for a second, her eyes flicked to the audience, to where Lee Adama sat. The seat next to him was empty: Zak hadn't been able to bear this. Finally she spoke, her voice cracking. "No, sir. It was over, sir."_

_Lee let out a breath in relief and risked a look at the Commander. The old man's face was granite. Angry. But Zak would get a chance to test again, at least._

_And then he looked at Kara, who had just been dismissed. Her face had the taut, glazed expression he'd come to learn was the last calm before the storm. She went out without looking at him, her posture military-correct but her stride too fast, too long. Nearly running, nearly crying._

_"The panel finds there is sufficient conflict of interest to endorse the request of Commander Adama; Cadet Adama is entitled to retest immediately in Basic Flight. His examiner will be -"_

_The formalities droned on for a second, and Lee realised with a start that his father was standing, rose hurriedly beside him. "Thank you, Colonel Trevis. And Lieutenant Thrace?"_

_"Sir," the colonel responded, his eyes hard. "Thrace has been one of my best, and most effective instructors for three years. She's the best pilot I've ever seen. I certainly do not endorse her involvement with one of her students, but while it was a bad choice, it was not only her choice, was it? There is no evidence to support a claim of bias. Cadet Adama's previous flight records do not reassure me that he would have passed with a different instructor; just the opposite. But because there is verifiable conflict of interest, he'll get a second chance."_

_The officer closed his file, straightened his formal tunic. "It's only fair that my instructor fares similarly, isn't it?"_

_Lee winced, could almost feel the anger radiating off the man beside him. "She tried to ruin my son's career, Colonel."_

_"It's her job to do just that, Commander. It's her job to make sure that the people we send up in Vipers can cut it. It's her job to fail them now, so they don't get themselves killed later. It's his word against hers why she failed him, and he's got his chance to prove it. I'm determined to give Starbuck the same."_

_Commander Adama wasted no more time in argument, but turned on his heel and left. Lee watched the chief instructor of Sparta Military Academy, Picon, pick up his files, watched the expression on the older man's face, almost jumped when Trevis spoke to him. "Something I can do for you, Lieutenant Adama?"_

_He wanted to ask where he'd find Kara, but the man wouldn't know, most likely. He wanted to ask why Trevis had given in so readily to the old man's demands, if he believed Kara's word. He wanted to know what the man thought really happened between his brother and his friend, but the thoughts were too tangled to loose even one._

_"Sir, no sir."_

_Two weeks later, back at his post aboard Atlantia, the word came through. Zak got his wings, and they killed him._

**+6 hours**

"Colonial Fleet recognition signals, Sir!"

Dee's voice jarred Colonel Tigh out of his reverie, and for a moment, he resented it. The end of the worlds, and he survived. Was that a good thing? Still half-abstracted, he didn't think, just let the automatic reply come to his lips. "Identify, Dee?"

"Not a battlestar, sir; they'd have signal boosters, and what I'm getting is being broken up by the electrostatic interference. But whatever it is, it's coming through that cloud, on the far side of Ragnar moon. And it's fast. Will be weapons range in three minutes."

"Through the cloud?" His fingers twitched towards the cup as he turned abruptly on Gaeta, clenched. _No; no time for that now. No place for that now. Do your job, Saul_. "Gaeta?"

"We're still only two-thirds through the rearmament sir, and Commander Adama's still aboard Ragnar, along with most of Tyrol's deck crew. DC Alpha crew are in full skin, out working on the hull damage. We can't decouple from the station."

"Kelly?"

The LSO put a hand over his headset's 'phone, "Five vipers out there, sir. I have them flying interdict between the cloud break and the civilian ships. I think I can get two more out."

"Do it, and move some of your watchdogs off the sheep and into this mix. Whatever that thing is, I want something between it and us. Jeren, lets prep the starboard guns, plot me an perimeter solution. And someone get word to Tyrol, see if we can't get the old man off the station before ..."

The resulting bustle was kind of soothing, reassuring. He leaned against the _dradis_ console, watching the red dot marked unidentified fade in and out as it crawled across the screen towards them. "Frakkin' clouds," he snarled at the monitor. "Can't we filter this out somehow?"

"No sir - it's the signal that it's interfering with, not our equipment." Dee worked dials and switches in an attempt anyway. "Sir, Vipers in interdict position, Apollo's on the line."

It was tough to have to let Lee Adama go on alert status as a pilot, knowing it would be likely that they'd have to send him out almost immediately. His old man hadn't even been told Apollo was alive yet - there'd been no time. But knowing Lee was in a Viper somehow, conversely, made Tigh feel a little better, too: if the kid was anything like his father - and his record said he was, in the cockpit at least - he was a hell of a pilot. And that was precisely what he needed between _Galactica_ and ... whatever this was. "Put him through. Apollo, you copy?"

"Yes sir. No visual yet, but Boomer's _dradis_ is still reporting Fleet signals. It's too garbled to pick out the ID numbers, though, but the computer's recognizing too much for it to be a fake."

"Why'd they fly through the cloud, then? Ragnar gate is clearly marked on the charts."

"Got me, sir. But I wouldn't wanna fly through that murk. Whoever it is, they got balls."

"Or they're Cylons, and aren't afraid of dying."

"Copy that, sir."

"_Galactica_, Boomer. Signal strength increasing, should have visual any second -"

"Contact!" Apollo whooped. "Looks Colonial, sir -_ Archer_-class. Setting up interdict."

"An _Archer_?" Tigh muttered. "What the frak is one of the reconnaissance fleet doing here? They were all supposed to have bought it with the _Proteus_ battlegroup, near Picon - Boomer, hail them, tell them to turn their engines the frak off and keep their distance 'till we sort this out. And get me an ID!"

"Hailing us, sir." Dee replied, flicked a switch and the transmission seemed too loud in the sudden silence of CIC.

"_Galactica_, this is the Colonial Fleet Scout ship, _Aurora_, Captain Kara Thrace commanding. Not that we're not glad to see you, or anything, but I wouldn't send anybody out the gate right now. There's at least two full squadrons of Cylons out there, waiting... and a pair of BaseStars."

Tigh, his jaw still slack with surprise, felt it tighten with fear. Over the comms, he heard Apollo mutter 'frak'. _Took the words right out of my mouth, kid. Your old man's gonna love this_. He exhaled noisily, thumbed his com-button. "_Aurora_, this is Colonel Tigh, Galactica's XO. What's your status?"

"Sir, we took some damage; our port dorsal engine's fried, and I've got some compartments sealed off back there. Personnel count is down a few - we lost half-a-dozen vipers at Picon, and took a few hits, with a few more casualties. Other than that, we're flying."

"Both our slips are tied up at present, Captain, so get yourself into a steady orbit, then report to CIC over here. Do I need to send a raptor?"

"Sir, no thank you, sir. I'll manage." The woman's voice was steady. "Sir, my medical crew offers their assistance, if necessary."

"Good. Bring them with you. Tigh out."

"Starbuck out," she echoed. _Galactica_'s XO stared at the wireless set, shaking his head. _Thrace made it. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at that_. It seemed the height of irony, under the circumstances; Bill Adama had spent more than two years trying to have Kara Thrace discharged or demoted or something - anything - in restitution for the death of his younger son. He hadn't quite succeeded, but then again, lead pilot of the flight contingent of a reconnaissance vessel was not a posting pilots dreamed of.

Then again, neither was a berth on _Galactica_ - at least, it hadn't been, before today.

Still, she was here, and it was one more thing the Old Man would have to deal with. There was a very large question to be asked, though. _Aurora _survived: where was her CO? or her XO? Why was a mere captain, hot pilot or not, at the helm of the light attack ship? And how had she survived the battle at Picon, with the rest of the fleet destroyed?

It wasn't a question he could answer yet; and at any rate, it wasn't his question to ask. Lower rank or not, Thrace apparently commanded the ship, and there were certain courtesies involved, even in war. Besides, Bill - if Saul knew him at all - would want to be the one who asked those questions. And he'd want the answers, first hand.

"Dee, get me a status report on the rearmament and find out where the frak the commander is on that station." He tossed the command over his shoulder, heard her affirmatives. "Good. Mister Gaeta, it's your deck." The thought was a relief, even though he had tougher problems on his hands right now than standing a watch in CIC. _Gods_, he thought, _what I wouldn't give for a drink_.

**+8 hours**

_Lee is alive._

He hadn't really heard the rest of it, hadn't cared. Knew there was more, knew about Thrace, the _Aurora_, the civilian fleet. The apparent President, waiting in the admiralty suite. The cylon, on its way to the morgue. It was a blur, because his son is alive and nothing else could drown out that chant in his head.

He'd been walking _Galactica'_s corridors for ten years. They'd never seemed so long before. It was hard to keep his pace down, not to run, rank be damned. But he needed these few minutes, needed to be able to tune out whatever ire his son might spit at him, needed to be able to show him, even if the words wouldn't come. He could do that, couldn't he?

Not far to go, now, the door loomed, thirty steps maybe. He tried not to lengthen his stride, tried to tell his body that if Lee was in that room, if he really was there, then he wasn't going to disappear. Not like Zak.

Dignity be frakked. He let his pace match his heartbeat, pulled the hatch open and stopped dead on the threshold: Lee. Alive, breathing, his eyes locked on the photograph that had been on that spot on that desk for ten years. Lee, grieving.

He stepped up, didn't let his son stalk away. Not this time. And when Lee's form relaxed, when the answering embrace wrapped around him...

It was only a little later. They drank water, because neither of them could afford the distraction of alcohol. They spoke quietly, mostly about the ships, how many pilots, how Lee had fended off a Cylon missile. Finally, when the frequent pauses were growing uncomfortable, Lee brought up something that Commander Adama really didn't want to discuss. He felt his face smooth out into inscrutability, and harden there.

"I don't want to discuss Captain Thrace."

"No, sir. But I need to know what you want me to do about pilots. _Aurora'_s contingent, along with ours, makes almost the two squadrons of a Battlestar's usual complement. And _Aurora _has damage to their launch and landing deck - looked to me like a missile strike, midships. It'll be a while before they can get back to full operational status." Lee paused, his mouth a tight line. "We're already penned in here. How long do you plan to stay at Ragnar after we've rearmed?"

"I want to be out of here as soon as possible. The longer we stay, the more entrenched the Cylons will be."

Lee paused again, didn't look at him. "And the civilians?"

"They'll be safe here, for the meantime. The Cylons don't cope well in this murk."

It was an ugly patch of space, alright, Adama acknowledged. Dirty, opaque cloud, shot through with sparks, jets, streams of static charge that could fry a ship, turn her systems into so much electronic junk. He could see it out the window, his small view port one of the privileges of command: a view of space. It was ugly, but it was, for the time being, his best defense. He'd hate to have to take a ship into that.

Almost on cue, the station's rotation - and _Galactica'_s, while they were docked - brought the _Aurora _into view, the flattened wedge of the scout ship showing dreadful scars... yet it came through the cloud, apparently unscathed, at least from that encounter. "How in the seven hells did she do it?" he muttered at the view port.

"You can ask her, sir." Lee jerked his head in the general direction of CIC. "She reported in - flew a raptor over with her medstaff aboard, and a few casualties they thought would benefit from better facilities - and is currently in CIC, setting up crew listings and inventory with Gaeta. And something about Viper programming."

"I will." There were a few other things he'd like to ask Thrace, too. Only some of them were tactical. "But she can wait. First I have to deal with President Roslin."

"She _is_ the president, sir."

"You're sure?"

"I was there. The automated message came through while I was on the flight deck of her ship." His son looked at the floor, then up at him, his jaw set. "I watched her listen to the Case Orange broadcast, watched her transmit her ID back. She's the only surviving member of the Colonial executive."

"For what that's worth," he couldn't help muttering. "She expects us to ride herd on her refugee ships. But she's a bureaucrat, not a soldier."

"Maybe. But she has a job to do, too."

"Then she can do it. But I have a war to fight."_ A war I've feared, I've expected for more than thirty years_.

Lee's chin firmed again, his lips a flat line, but he dropped the issue. "At any rate, let me know what you want me to do about _Aurora'_s pilots. I better get back to the deck. Thank you for your time, sir." He saluted, his posture stiff and formal. Ten minutes ago, he'd been a son again, and now he was a subordinate. A soldier. It made Bill proud. It made his chest ache.

He looked at his blood spattered tunic, the dress blues darkened along the epaulette, the grey trim brown around the collar, and got a fresh one for his meeting with the new president. The corridor didn't seem as long this time, but the thought struck him halfway down it that he'd spent more time waiting for a war than his son had been alive. He'd been right, when everyone had called him a fool. But the thought was too bitter. He'd rather have been wrong.

**+9 hours**

It wasn't what he hoped their first meeting in so long would be like.

Last time he'd seen her - two years ago, in a cell in Fleet Headquarters - she'd been close to crazy with grief. She was drunk, angry and still mourning; it had seemed to Lee as though the three months since Zak's death had eaten her from the inside. She was too thin, her eyes reddened, her muscles tense and flexing under skin that was simultaneously dull and paper-thin. Had she not been eating properly? Surviving on caffeine, nicotine, alcohol? Did she never sleep? She'd glared at him through the bars and gone back to her workout - gods only knew how she could do push ups with what must be the hangover from Hades itself.

And now?

Lee had recognized her before he could see more than the slant of her shoulders in the press of the maintenance bay; caught a glimpse of her hair, boyishly cut as always. As he ducked through the crowd, too new to _Galactica _to be recognizable at all, let alone acknowledged as CAG, he saw her duck, push herself under the Viper she'd been next to. She was still there, booted, flight-suited legs protruding from under the chassis as she worked.

She hadn't seen him. He contemplated kicking his toes into the sole of her boot, but he wasn't sure their old camaraderie existed now; she might deck him. She'd done it before. Instead, he let himself take her in: firm muscles under the tanks she'd worn beneath the flight suit, feminine curves with spare, graceful strength. Ivory skin - and a smear of grease across her jaw. He couldn't help but smile. "Hey."

Her hands stopped moving. Slowly her head turned, angling so she could see him around the curve of the Viper's hull. Then she pushed out from beneath it, wrapped strong (if grimy) fingers around his proffered hand and let him help her up. Her hand was warm. "Lee..." she said at last. "Thought you were dead."

"Thought you were, too," he said, a similar pause afflicting him before he could get his mouth to work.

"It's good to be wrong," she said, and smiled, and oh _gods_, it was _Kara_ and suddenly years fell away and Lee found himself grinning back at her, the old flippant replies coming to his lips as automatic as breathing.

She grinned wider, and by the time he realized he still held her hand, he felt as though his face might ache. Their hands fell apart slowly, then, sinking down, drifting, before the last contact of skin faded away. "Repairs?" he said, and jerked his chin at the Viper without looking away from her.

"She'll be ready to launch in an hour." Kara reached for a rag, scrubbed her hands with it, and then grinning, offered it to him. "Of course, it's one of yours, not one of mine."

"You have these relics on _Aurora_?" he asked, eyebrows going up. The Mark-2 craft had been literally museum exhibits before the attacks. "What for?"

"EmCon effective. You can fly these with almost no avionics package, and no navigation suite, if you're good. We had six as training models, tweaked a bit, but still the basic systems. You can also launch 'em without the tubes." Her face went flat. "Most of our sevens never made it out, at Picon; systems shut down while they were in the tubes. The six that did..."

Lee nodded. He knew what had happened to pilots in the newer, computer-assisted Vipers.

"So," she said, switching tack with her old, familiar abruptness, "I hear you're a CAG now."

"So they tell me," he said. He grinned, but it was rueful.

"That's good. Though," and she looked at him through eyes suddenly wicked with humor, "it'd be the last thing I'd want. I'm not a big enough dipstick for the job."

Lee didn't realize how much he needed to laugh until it was pouring out of him, out of both of them, till they were leaning against the side of the viper, shoulders touching and shaking helplessly. It took a minute to slow, a minute more until they could breathe again, look each other in the face. It would be nice to stop there, in the familiar, comfortable place they'd had, once upon a time. "Congratulations on captain," he said at last, remembering the stab of pride he'd had when he heard her say her name and rank on the wireless. "When did that happen?"

"Four months ago. Rhys surprised me with it, the bastard. He knew I didn't want to rank up."

"Surprised he let you, with your record." It was a _faux pas_; her record was relatively clean. It was the things that weren't on it that had done all the damage.

Kara stiffened, but she covered it well. "Yeah, well. I think he just wanted another command rank aboard the ship to shuffle off his admin duties to."

"Wouldn't blame him if he had. Paperwork..."

She groaned. "Don't say that word to me."

"Can't have been that bad, on a scout ship. You guys wouldn't even have had mail call most of the time..."

"Mail would be easier than trying to keep thirty-two pilots from going stir-crazy for months at a stretch in a ship the size of a soup can!"

They both laughed a little, but it wasn't really funny. "You know, as Lead Pilot on your ship, you probably have more command experience than me, Kara."

"Keep your voice down," she drawled mockingly. "If you think I wanna do your job you need your head examined." More laughter, but her smile had a bitter twist to it. "Besides, I can think of likelier events than my being made CAG on your old man's ship, Lee. Like the Cylons deciding it was all a big mistake, and taking off again for wherever the frak they came from."

And that wasn't funny either. Not at all.

"Yeah. Well, I wish neither of us had to deal with him."

"Don't you think we've lost enough, Apollo? Be glad you've still got an old man."

Lee couldn't help laughing at that, a mockery of humor. "You're defending him? Gods, Kara, he nearly ruined your career. And Zak -"

"Same old Lee," she interrupted, shook her head slowly, "You haven't changed a bit, have you? Still holding your theories close and your grudges closer."

That stung. "Zak was my brother!"

"What was he to me, nothing?" The rejoinder was so fast, so whip-sharp, it cut him at the heart.

"You know that's not what I meant, Kara."

"I think I should go," she shrugged off the hand he had on her arm, began zipping herself back into the upper part of her flight-suit. "Not sure my record could stand it if I hit another Adama."

Her salute was crisp, but her eyes were miserable. Lee watched her walk away, across the hangar deck, and wondered again just why it was that they always left each other bruised deep under the skin.

**+9 hours, forty minutes**

It was the closest thing to an interrogation she'd ever seen outside the brig. Commander Adama, with his glare firmly fixed, flanked by his XO and the newly sworn President, didn't move from his seat, and didn't offer her one. Kara stood at parade rest, trying to keep a lid on the maelstrom of emotions and keep her answers clear and calm.

Lee stood at the side, at a distance, as always. Same old Lee.

"Under whose orders," Adama asked, slowly and clearly as though he considered her a moron, "did you retreat from the battle near Picon?"

"My own, sir."

"I see. Care to explain why that should convince me, Captain?"

She didn't much care about her rank, but that was the first time she'd ever heard it used as an insult.

"Sir, I was there, in my viper, when the cylons blew _Proteus _out of the sky. It was gone, sparks. _Aurora _was still flying, and there were a few other vipers, but most of them were just drifting, dead in the water. Nothing else, no battlestars, no cruisers, no other ships at all. Just us. My comms officer had just finished sending that information on the fleet channel when _Aurora _took a blast midships, a missile that made it through the perimeter fire, and then the channel went dead. The bridge was out, and I called the pilots back close to the ship, within the perimeter, to keep off any more fire. Next thing I heard, my CMO's on the channel, telling me Major Wiley was dead and Colonel Marrol was down."

"Down? Not dead?" The president queried, leaning forward in her seat. Kara flicked her eyes over the woman, not sure what to make of the inscrutable expression or the imperturbable calm. At least she wasn't an outright enemy, like the Commander. The thought hit her under the heart: _Zak's father hates me. Zak's dead_.

"No, Ma'am. I wasn't sure of that at the time, but he was unconscious, head injuries from the blast. XO was under the same gangway when it came down, but wasn't so lucky; it broke his neck." It cost her a pang to remember Jake Wiley; his curt manners and bluff humor so much like her own. "With both of them out, it was me or no-one. I got my people back aboard ship, along with a few other drifting pilots, and got us the hell out of there."

"Under enemy fire?" Adama was almost scoffing. "You were the only target, and you still had time to get away?"

"_Aurora _is a light attack ship, sir" she found herself snapping back. "Admiral Nagala had us and the _Alekto _on the very edge of the conflict, to outflank and harry any lighter Cylon ships. The Cylons didn't focus on us until the Battlestars were all gone. Yes, we had time. Four minutes before the base ships had us in range. Four minutes that cost me six pilots, sir. Up until then, it was just those frakkin' raiders and their missiles that we had to deal with."

"You said the bridge was out. How did you jump away after getting your fighters back aboard?"

He should know this, the smug bastard. "It's not a battlestar, sir. Helm and FTL are not in the command center, they're in the forward bow."

"But the navigational computers -"

"I didn't use them."

Silence reigned. It would have felt good, except she was tired, pissed off, itching to knock her superior officer's teeth down his raspy throat. She wanted five minutes alone, five minutes to remember Wicks and Checkers and Twotone and Lace, to say goodbye to Jake and Dessie before she had to mention their names again as statistics in a casualty report. But she had no chance of that, not yet.

"You jumped blind?"

"No, sir. I made the calculations by hand."

"You made them yourself."

"Yes, sir." It was fun to surprise the old bastard. "Look, sir, I may be a Viper pilot, but I've been aboard _Aurora _for two years. It's a small ship, with less than three hundred aboard including my pilots. There isn't that many officers of command rank, and all of us trained to handle her helm, if it became necessary." She tried to restrain her grin of malicious glee when she added, ostensibly offhand: "and surely, sir, you didn't think you were the _only_ ship in the fleet reluctant to rely totally on your computers?"

For all the impact the statement made, Adama might have been made of granite. Tigh looked a little shell-shocked, however. The president had what might amount to a half-smile, but Lee (now carefully out of his father's line of sight) was biting his lip. Whether that was laughter or frustration, she couldn't tell. _Yup. Same old Lee_.

"You jumped to where?"

"Preset retreat co-ordinates. That was half the reason I was able to complete the calculations so quickly, only needed to factor in the start point on an inertial jump. A calculator and -"

"I asked where, Captain."

Kara felt her own teeth grinding. "Macedon sector, sir."

"Were there cylons there?"

"No, sir. That's where we picked up your rally signal."

"And you came straight here?"

"No, sir. Not enough fuel. The military refueling stations were blown - figured the Cylons blew them and left before we got there - so we made a pit stop at XH-441."

"That's a civilian facility," Tigh objected.

"It was closed a month ago, for repairs to the life-support systems." _Gods, would the questions never end? _"Sir."

"Captain Thrace," the president suggested quietly, "why don't you just tell us the rest of the story?"

_Finally. Common frakking sense_. "Thank you, Madam President." Adama didn't like it, but he shrugged as though it made little difference. Kara resisted the urge to roll her eyes. "In short, the cylons showed up as we finished refueling. There were a few civilian ships - the _Hecuba _and the_ Great Tauron _- that were still tanking off the station. We covered them until they could jump, then jumped ourselves. Right before mark though my raptor support picked up a radiological alarm on one of the incoming raiders. I told them to jump, and put _Aurora_ between the raider and the civvy ships. Our guns took out all but one of the nukes.

"_'Rora's _hull plating isn't heavy. I knew we couldn't take another blast midships, so I turned our ass to the blast, hoping the thicker stuff around the engine housings could hold most of it. It worked... fried the port ventral and left us leakier than a sieve in the aft engineering spaces, but it worked. We got to Ragnar Gate okay, sealed off our vented compartments, and got to work on getting the nav systems back online. I didn't want to run the Gate without better helm control. On three engines, she handles like a cow.

"We hadn't quite done with the quick fixes by the time the neighbors showed. We got away from the gate and out of sight behind the cloud, but when we couldn't raise you on wireless through the interference, there wasn't much choice but risk flying through."

"As simple as that? Just fly through?" Tigh sounded incredulous.

"Not simple, sir. We shut down all systems except life support and basic helm and engines. FTL and ordinance were completely offline. _Dradis _was useless anyway, but we turned that off too. Funnily enough, it was the frakked engine that made it possible. I had to fight the helm to keep her on course, and as long as I kept the same degree of yaw, I knew I was on track. If I'd just had her pointed nose to the needle, there'd have been no way to be sure we were going straight."

For a moment, Adama looked almost appreciative. "Quartering the wind?" he asked, his lip curling. The nautical expression wasn't so much traditional as clichéd, but it worked. Just an instant, a hint of kinship, of understanding, and it was gone again, his expression back to stony, eyes blue as ice and twice as cold. "So, then. Status report on your ship, Captain."

"Sir. _Aurora _lost five command crew, including the XO, seven pilots, seven vipers and twenty-four enlisted personnel during and after the battle near Picon, and seventeen more crew to the nuke at XH-441. We have fourteen injured, including Colonel Marrol and many of the communications staff, but my medics seem optimistic about them. _Aurora's _roster has twenty-two pilots fit for duty, including myself, and twenty-three vipers, though eighteen of those are mark-seven's, and vulnerable to whatever computer trick the toasters are using. The five others are adapted mark-two's. We have all six raptors and the full complement of our Raptor crew. Munitions are good, we have all eight tactical warheads still, though the ventral missile bay is fouled. The CMO reports medical stocks are good. You already have a full inventory and crew listing. Repairs are under way on both the engines and the hull breaches, though going is slow because the plating is still hot. The bridge was almost back online when I left for _Galactica_, sir."

_That was the important stuff, twenty questions asked and answered, surely that was enough with the inquisition? Surely now, they could deal with sending her back to her ship? Gods, she'd give up her wings to sit down_.

_Almost_.

"Very well. Have your people fill out their logs and send them over, Captain. In the meantime..."

_Sleep. Please say it, sleep_.

"... you're to work with Lt. Gaeta and Dr. Baltar on reprogramming our remaining Mark-seven vipers. I believe you have some experience with that?"

He was smug. The bastard was smug, it was pasted all over his scarred, supercilious face. Still, smug or not, bastard or not, he needed her. She failed one Adama. It wasn't the kind of experience she wanted to repeat. "Yes, sir. A little."

"Good. Dismissed."

Kara drew herself up, ignoring how much it hurt to force her muscles to attention, snapped a salute. Lee did likewise, but it surprised her not at all that the old man didn't release him. He didn't want Lee in the same room with her, probably didn't even want them on the same ship together.

Not that she could blame him for that.

In the end, _Galactica _herself intervened, the miles of causeways in the great old ship confusing and misleading her; Kara was too used to the smaller, cozier confines of the _Aurora _and her much more functional design. She was pretty sure she'd walked in a circle when Lee came out of a corridor on her right, his expression frosty. It thawed, just a little, when he saw her.

"Not that I am all that familiar with this can myself, Starbuck" he began, "but I think CIC's this way." He nodded back the way she'd come.

"Figures."

They walked in silence, letting the bustle of technicians and maintenance crew and sundry flow around them; a little space opened up just as they climbed the stairs that led to CIC. "For what it's worth" he said hesitantly, paused on the top step, "I suggested we let you rack out; you've had a busy day, and could probably use some sleep. But..." Lee shrugged slightly, helpless.

Kara couldn't help it, she smiled at him. Yeah, he was still the same old Lee. But that wasn't necessarily a totally bad thing. Adamas - even the original version - had a charm about them. Combined with Lee's looks - _prettier than Zak, always was_, the thought surfaced in her tired mind, and was quickly suppressed - he could have won over most women, if he tried.

Just then, Adama walked passed them, expressionless, but his posture tight with suspicion. Starbuck squared her shoulders, looked at the Commander's back so Lee wouldn't see how much it hurt that Zak's father ... cut it out, Thrace. "That's okay, Lee. I'll sleep when I'm dead."


	2. Chapter 2

**Title**: _Eris and Aurora_ 2/7

**Length**: 4,300 words, roughly, this part.

**Rating**: PG, language and concepts. Will be M and NC-17 in later parts.

**Characters**: Kara, Lee, Adama as focii. Will be K/L later.

**Notes:** AU, begins during the mini-series. Occasional backstory flashbacks. No spoilers for anything beyond the mini-series at this point. Unbeta'd. Naturally, characters and concepts are property of RDM / SciFi / Larson.

**-3 years**

The sun was in his eyes.

It seemed obscene that they were burying Zak on a day that made Picon idyllic, with sunshine and grass so green and lush you could smell verdancy in your tracks, where the blades were crushed. It wasn't right that he should be dead, but if it had to be, why couldn't the world show a little respect? Why couldn't it storm, why couldn't the sun go out, why couldn't the sky go black or red or something other than that everyday, cheerful, _beautiful_ blue?

Across the flag-draped coffin, the military contingent held their funereal salute the traditional three beats, and the guns fired off their traditional volley, and those were obscene too. Nothing traditional about the death his brother had suffered, his Viper tumbling into the ground at speeds which meant the coffin was little more than yet another tradition. He let his fingers rest on the thing, just for a minute, knowing that this was supposed to be the end, the farewell. But Lee wanted to shake his head, scream. Cry. _No_, he thought,_ I don't want it to be over. I don't want to say goodbye_.

The military contingent - strange, it occurred to him, that he didn't feel like one of them anymore - in their straight lines and white gloves and sad expressions were moving, his father among them. Lee felt the tide of anger wash over him, looking at the man; grief made no impact on the timeworn features. It might have been a mask for all the emotion that was visible, and that was appropriate, wasn't it? He made himself look away from his father. Now wasn't the time to deal with that.

Between the weaving blur of dress grays, he caught a glimpse of moonstruck hair. She'd been near the back, or he would have seen her earlier.

He hadn't expected to see her at all.

Naturally, he'd gone to find her when he arrived back at Picon; even though the thing between his brother and Kara had been over, he knew the woman had loved Zak. He'd seen it growing, had watched it with the pained fascination of an envy he didn't really understand. He didn't know why it had ended, but over or not, Kara had loved Zak. She'd hoped to be his wife.

Now, instead of the place of a widow, or a bride bereaved, she stood at the back of the funeral cortege; instead of with him or his father and mother, she stood painfully alone. She'd been crying, gods - he'd never seen her cry, not in a year of friendship, mad, frenzied, accelerated and yet natural though it had been - and she was on her own.

Lee circled the edge of the grave without thinking about it, Fleet personnel and Academy nuggets melting out of his way. He didn't think she was even seeing him, because she didn't move until he wrapped his hands around her elbows. "Kara?"

Her voice cracked, rasped. "Hey, Lee."

"I'm so sorry, Kara - you shouldn't have had to do this alone."

"I shouldn't have had to do it at all," she hissed, and he was mesmerized by how easily the tears ran down her face for things so unaccustomed. "This wasn't supposed to happen, Lee!"

"Gods, Kara -" His control was slipping. "Don't."

"It's the truth" she insisted, stubborn even in defeat.

"Yes," a familiar voice cut in. "Yes, it is."

Kara went rigid in his grasp, and Lee felt the same current go through him as he turned, turning him to ice, a glacier of frozen words rolling out of his mouth.. "Yes, sir, it is. It wasn't supposed to happen, because he wasn't supposed to pass. He didn't pass. The only reason he was up there was because _you_ made it happen."

Commander Adama went ashen under his tan, suddenly gray all over, his features contorting briefly before the natural control returned. "I only had to because Lieutenant Thrace," and he almost spat the name at the woman beside Lee, "because Lieutenant Thrace saw fit to let her feelings interfere with her job."

Lee let his hand slide down Kara's arm, gripped her hand briefly, but the fingers were slack and cold. "Ironic, isn't it," he drawled back, "that she was right, after all?"

The Commander's lip thinned to a line of fury, his eyes hard. If most of the mourners hadn't already left, they'd be going now. Running, almost. Lee felt too cold to run, and Kara's hand in his was heavy as lead. Finally, the old man spoke. "Is that what you think? You think this woman didn't make this happen, didn't frak with Zak's confidence, didn't make him scared he'd lose everything he's worked for in the last three years? You think that, because he didn't want her anymore, this woman didn't break his focus the only way she could?"

Word by word, Kara had started shaking; her fingers were trembling so wildly in his palm that he was almost afraid for her. It wasn't that his father's words didn't reach him, they did, but the instinct to defend her, his friend, his dear, impossible friend, galvanized him. He stared back, threw his defiance in the old man's teeth. "You think," he picked up where the Commander left off, using the same tone, the same venom, "you didn't force him up there before he had a chance to deal with it all, didn't pull strings to make the Inquiry send him up ASAP instead of the regulation term? You think you didn't put him back in a Viper before he was ready to go, Dad? You think you didn't put him right back in the Viper that killed him?"

The old man paused for a moment, shell-shocked it seemed though his face never changed, staring at him. He never glanced at Kara, who stood, almost at attention and rigid with pain, just looked at Lee with a kind of unthinking horror. Then he was gone, and Lee thought for a moment that the earth beneath his feet had turned spongy and uneven. He stumbled against Kara and pulled her close.

She let him, for a minute. He felt the phantom tickle of her wind-stirred hair brushing his cheek. He felt the silent sobs wrack her, but when she pulled away, her eyes were dry.

"Don't... don't go, Kara," he heard himself say, wanted to stay with her, wanted not to feel so alone in this angry betrayal, this helpless grief. "Don't let him get to you."

She looked him in the eyes, then, and he saw emptiness in hers, way down to some unimaginable depth. "You should go after him" she suggested, and Lee felt the world drop out from under his feet.

"What?"

Kara looked over at the gaping hole in the earth, the dirt that would cover Zak, and then back at him. She sounded like someone else when she spoke. "Because, Lee, he's your father. And he's right."

**+ 13 hours**

Laura Roslin - no, that's _President_ Laura Roslin - didn't really have time to deal with a maverick military commanders; she didn't have time to eat, to sleep, to process what had happened that day, really. She was inundated with cries for help, with threats, with pleas, with demands for someone to explain that this was all a nightmare, and it was time to wake up. She didn't have time to play nursemaid to the pyramid kids and sort out whose fault it was that the game was over so soon.

Five hours ago, she'd had to tell this man his war was over. Now, he sat across from her, damnably inscrutable, and told her she was right, but that there was another yet to fight.

She looked at the man, tried to see some hint of something other than control in the olive features. "You're sure of your decision, Commander?"

Adama grimaced. "There's no decision to be made, Madam President. The Colonies have been nuked. Even if every Cylon in the universe dropped dead right now, we couldn't go back there."

"I agree, Commander, but that wasn't the question I was asking."

"No?"

"I'm asking about your decision not to fight. Forgive me if I misunderstand, but that went very much against the grain with you."

He sat still for a moment, his eyes dropping to the desktop. "You're right. It does. I've feared this day for half my life. I've anticipated it, plotted for it, trained my people not to discount the possibility of war simply through the habit of peace. But the fact remains that my preparation saved nothing but my own ship. Not even all my pilots, most of whom died without ever firing a shot in the war that killed them.

"I don't fear dying, Madam President. But I'd rather die for a purpose; fighting a futile war wouldn't be that kind of death. If, on the other hand, my people and I die because we're doing the only thing that remains to us - saving the human race - then that's still fighting. And I can live with that."

"You think we'll die, Commander?"

It was hard not to respond to the man's charisma. Cold as he seemed, he was also unshakably honest; his words weren't his unvarnished thoughts, but he meant every one. "I don't intend to die. I don't intend to let my people die, or the civilian ships die. But I don't intend to let fear of dying stop me, either."

She nodded. "Then how long can we afford to stay here?"

His shoulders slumped a little he pinched the bridge of his nose, behind the barrier of his glasses. "Not long. I wanted to give my people a chance to rest and regroup, but tension is running high. In another few hours, there'll be problems all over the fleet, when reality starts to hit and people start to realize just what we're facing here. I need them focused for a little while yet, enough to get us out of here, past that Cylon blockade and through a jump to Prolmar. Then they can sleep."

"How long?"

He sighed. "Excuse me. I'm tired. Another two hours, three at the most; the worst of the damage to _Galactica_ should be patched; _Aurora_ should be good to go even sooner than that. We also need to plot and test our jump co-ordinates: it's a long hop. I don't want to jump it blind."

Three hours; enough time, perhaps, to have the worst of the fleet's wounded transferred to the science ship. Enough time to start checking supplies on the larger vessels. "And where do we go from there?"

She hadn't meant to say it out loud, but the tiredness in Adama's face had disarmed her; now, he looked at her, and for a fleeting instant she saw his expression unguarded. The look on it vanished too quickly to decipher, to really decipher it, but for that split second she thought him in shock. Then it was gone, and the face was again set. Was that a hint of uncertainty in his voice? "I don't know. There isn't time to start accessing the survey charts and start looking for likely planets - it takes weeks to complete sector surveys. The few bases we had that might be suitable were all in the defense mainframes, they'll be known. I'll talk to my navigational staff, but... I don't know."

The fact that he didn't know seemed to frighten him more than had defeat in a nuclear war. And what that said about him, she wasn't yet sure. But it wasn't encouraging. She pushed the stab of fear aside, reached a hand to him across the table. "Think about it at Prolmar, Commander" she suggested, was relieved when his features regained their expressionless set. "For now, just get us away from the Cylons."

He froze at that, his fingers clenched a little under her hand. The relaxation was slow, schooled. There was something more, and he hadn't yet figured out how to tell her. "Away from the Cylons," he repeated. "We're running away. I don't like the way that feels, Madam President."

"Neither do I, Commander. But like _Aurora_ and Captain Thrace, it's just us now. Did she make the wrong choice?" Adama's face smoothed into blankness again. He didn't like Thrace. He didn't want to approve her actions. Why? Laura watched him slowly relax. The last thing she needed was friction between the leaders of the military.

A brief knock sounded. "Yes?"

Billy peered in. "Madam President, Priestess Elosha requests a moment..."

"Of course." She saw the cleric waiting in the anteroom, saw the Commander nod to her. _Madam President_ again: life seemed so unreal, and yet she could see everything so clearly, from the stitching that held the Commander's shoulder-patch to the fabric of his tunic to Billy's crumpled collar (_why that ugly narrow stripe, Billy?)_ to the thirteen-stone prayer beads twisted through Elosha's fingers. The most unrealistic thing in the room, the most ironic thing, was that she herself should be the leader of the survivors. "Thank you for your time, Commander."

"Thank you for yours, Ma'am," he said, not without the ghost of a smile.

"By the way, Commander" she added as he passed Elosha, his military decorum offering the priestess a formal nod. "Your son saved my life, my ship, and what's left of the people of the Colonies. Thank you for not wasting those lives and ships in a losing battle."

He stopped then, turned. "Unfortunately, Madam President, the battle is not over yet."

**+ 15 hours**

The Raptor door yawned open behind her, framing her slim, solid shape; as always, she looked too small, too elfin to control the hulk of metal and engines and fires. The fanciful thought curled Lee's lip as he took the final steps towards his friend.

She glanced up from her clip-boarded checklist. "What?"

His head tilted, an eyebrow rising automatically. "What, yourself?"

"You're staring."

"Considering the irony of you, commanding a fleet vessel, and it's not a refuse tanker."

"Ha, ha. I'm still considering the irony of you commanding an Air Group."

"Promotion's a bitch," he agreed. "Back to _Aurora_ for the getaway?

"Only for long enough to settle a few things. I'll be back with my pilots."

"You're not -"

"The old man isn't putting anyone else in charge... yet. But I doubt it'll be long coming, if we make it out of this."

He nodded, his half-grin rueful. "I'll be glad you're on my wing, Starbuck."

She looked up at that, smiled openly. "It's been a while, hasn't it?"

"Yeah. Not since -"

"- before Zak died," she finished in clipped tones when he thought the better of his choice of replies. "I remember."

"Kara -"

"It's okay, Lee." A few medical personnel hit the bay and began filing past them into the Raptor; they wore the shadow-moon tag of the Reconnaissance fleet below their _Aurora_ patches, and each flipped Starbuck a salute as they went by. "I have to get my people back, then I'll lead my flight wing over. Should be fourteen of us, if the specialist was right in their estimate of how many of my Sevens they would get time to reprogram."

"That's fast work. Look, Kara -"

"Lee!" She signed her name to the pre-flight list, scraping the pen across the sheet hard enough to put the nib through the paper. "Don't tear yourself up over what your old man's doing to me."

"It's wrong! You don't -"

"Stop." Kara zipped her flight suit up, tucked her helmet under her arm and stood there, looking at the floor between them; finally she exhaled, let her eyes glance over his before they went back to the floor. "Zak failed basic flight, Lee. That's the truth. But I stood up in front of the panel and told them that Zak and I were through before he ever tested. And that's a lie."

Lee felt his throat closing, shook his head once, tried to understand. "What?"

"I lied. We weren't done. We weren't done until I had to look him in the face and tell him that I'd failed him."

"He did that to you?" Lee felt as though he ought to be angry at Zak, angry at his brother who was three years dead, for that. "But... but at the hearing..."

"It was the only thing I could give him, Lee. I couldn't give him his wings, but I could give him that chance. Without it, Trevis would never have acknowledged Conflict of Interest, because it was common knowledge that nobody worked harder with Zak, nobody wanted him to pass more than me."

Worlds had already burned today. Lee wasn't prepared for this, for the one he still had in his memory and imagination, to be added to the list. His throat worked. "Why are you telling me this now?"

Her head dropped forwards, he could see her knuckles strained white over the edge of her helmet. "My world began with losing my father." When she looked up again, her eyes were shiny with moisture. "It's the end of the world, Lee. There might not be the time left for you to find yours."

**+ 18 hours**

Whatever Galactica's limitations might be, the old ship didn't lack for firepower. In the chaos beyond the Battlestar's perimeter fire, Vipers swarmed, dove, darted, died... and killed. Rocked by the explosion of her fifth? sixth? raider target, Starbuck wrenched her control stick back upright, the inertial drift righting her Viper and then thrusting it forwards into the swarm of Cylon ships. "Come on, you bastards" she hissed, saw her tracer fire score across the hull of one of them. "Try and switch_ that_ off!"

On her flank, Tubby - possibly the thinnest pilot she'd ever seen, and after her, _Aurora_'s best - howled triumph as his own target disappeared in fire. "Splash two!" he hooted. "Guess they forgot to backdate their software, boss?"

"I ain't complaining" agreed another voice on the comm, probably Deek, by the sound.

Starbuck grinned, but her teeth were gritted. "Cut the yap, people. Stick with Apollo's crew, watch each other's backs."

"Gotcha, boss."

Shredded Raiders, and the remnants of a few Vipers whose jockeys hadn't moved fast enough, were turning space into an obstacle course; Kara swerved, dodged, fired amongst the debris, glad to see the first flash of FTL displacement as the civvy ships started their jumps. Peripherally she caught a flash from the other direction, spun, and swore.

Lee, his distinctive style of flight, still familiar, suddenly broken by the tremor of a crippled engine. "Frak me..."

"Boss? On your tail!" Tubby sounded strained, and Kara had to dodge and twist among the wreckage of her kills to avoid fire.

"Thanks, Alex" she muttered, but it was Apollo's spinning plane that had her attention. "Wing, follow Tubby's lead. Get back to _Galactica_ on the mark, people. I want to see you all after the jump."

"Copy that" was a chorus, but she didn't wait around to hear it. Instead, she jerked her ship backwards in a wrenching, stomach-lifting flip, dived through the melee after Lee's drifting Viper.

She saw it before he did, and wasn't sure she could get there in time; his head came up, seeing the white emission-trail of a missile headed for him, and something shot through her, harder than any raider projectile might. "No," she muttered. "Not Lee, too."

She knew as she fired that it might be too late; she was half afraid that the required haste might also put his drifting craft into her line of fire. She knew that if Lee took another hit - hers, or the missiles - he wouldn't make it. But she fired, because if she didn't, he was dead anyway. And that she could not permit. The rail-gun rounds, tracers a streak of red against the background of stars, cut a swathe through space, and then through the missile, and then she was laughing, crowing almost as she spun her own ship into the bloom of fire and out again.

"Looks like you broke your ship, Apollo!"

Lee's voice sounded breathless. "I've had worse. But ... Kara, thanks."

A smart-ass remark was called for, hovered on the tip of her tongue, but three more raiders heading for them left it unvoiced. Instead, Starbuck danced her ship around Lee's stricken one, amazed he could haul it around to fire at a fourth once she saw the huge rent down the old Mark-Two's side. Then she was too busy to be amazed, almost too busy to breathe. And too preoccupied with her self-appointed task to hear recall when it came.

Lee's voice broke her concentration. "I'm losing power, Starbuck, I'm not going to make it."

She ignored it, her guns laying down a barrier of fire that kept his death at bay.

"Get out of here, godsdamnit, Kara -"

"Shut up, Lee. I'm busy."

She would have laughed at his string of profanity, but she was telling the truth. Somehow her eyes were everywhere, her hands were directly wired to them, her body sinking into the Viper as though it were part of her or she was part of it, wielding it as naturally as she would her own hands, her own feet. The insistent voice on the comm demanding her return was drowned out by the deluge of fragmented debris skittering across her canopy, like hail or heavy rain.

"Please, Kara" she heard him repeat, when she'd carved a little breathing space amid the chaos. "Go." But it was the abrupt flash of _Aurora_ jumping away that finally broke her concentration. "Frak."

"Get out of here, Kara!"

"Lee, shut up and hold still."

_Well_, she told herself as she flipped the Viper over at a rate that forced the air out of her lungs, _if this doesn't work, we're dead anyway, Lee. But I'm not giving up on you. Not ever_.

She yanked back on the throttle and dove for him.

**+ 24 hours**

Bill Adama pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, exhaled; the funerals had left him tired and drained, and he didn't want to have to deal with this now. But there wasn't any other time. "Sit down, Captain."

"Sir?" Thrace's expression altered; he rather thought it was an attempt at polite skepticism but it looked more like open disbelief. But she lowered herself into a chair, moving stiffly.

"You disobeyed my XO's order to return to Galactica for jump."

"I didn't hear him, sir."

"I was a pilot too, Captain. Try again."

"Then you should know how total your focus can be out there... sir."

"In other words, you weren't listening."

"No, sir. I had more important things to do."

He wanted to hate that guileless, tired, elfin face. He did, in fact, hate it. It was just that he was learning what it was that had made his son spend two years with this woman and what he learned made it difficult to despise Kara Thrace so completely. "Yes," he agreed belatedly. "You were keeping my son alive."

"Apollo" she responded, a hint of defensiveness in the voice, "has been my friend a long time."

"He's been Zak's brother longer." The reply was sharp, automatic. "Was that why you had to save him?"

She stared at him, and the bitterness that twisted her features was surprising. "No. I had to save him because he's my friend. And thanks to you, sir, and the Cylons, I don't have many of those left."

Adama was on his feet before he knew it. "And thanks to you, my son is dead, Captain! In my place, could you have let that go?"

She rose also, posture ramrod straight, eyes meeting his without a trace of fear. "No, sir, I couldn't. But then again, that's not quite how it looks from my perspective, is it?"

His fingers itched. Rage coiled in his throat: a day since the end of the world, nearly three since the death of his son, and still he thought his loss would choke him. But he saw hazel eyes as hard as his staring back, and knew that there wasn't time now to fight this personal battle. He had a job to do first. "Colonel Marrol will be released from sickbay in a day or two, Captain. He will resume command of _Aurora_. When that happens..."

"Sir?"

"When that happens, you and your pilots will be transferring to _Galactica_."

She didn't seem surprised. "Yes, sir."

"Apollo will remain CAG."

No hint of surprise or resentment.

"Your squadron will be integrated. I'm assigning you to head up bravo wing. I will have no factions among my pilots, Captain."

No response at all, except "yes, sir."

"And you will treat all the pilots impartially, Captain, whatever their origin."

Her eyes tightened at that. "Of course, sir."

"Dismissed, captain." The salute was precise, but her lips were twisted in a way that could almost have been a smile if it weren't for the pain in it. She was at the door before he spoke again. "You saved Lee's life, Thrace. But that doesn't make us even."

"No, sir," she said over her shoulder. "It definitely doesn't."


	3. Chapter 3

**Title**: Eris and Aurora, 3/7

**Length**: 5700 words, roughly, this part.

**Rating**: M for language and concepts in this part.

**Characters**: Kara/Lee, Adama. Zak

**Notes**: AU, begins during the mini-series. Occasional back story flashbacks. No spoilers for anything beyond the episode 33 at this point. Unbeta'd. Naturally, characters and concepts are property of RDM / SciFi / Larson.

**-2 years, 8 months**

He would have thought she'd be drunk by now; it was the day she'd been supposed to get married, if Zak had lived, if Zak hadn't called things off so abruptly. Lee had been prepared for that eventuality with a thermos of coffee and some water and a few other useful items. He was also prepared for the possibility - unlikely though it seemed, knowing Kara - of tearful grief, though he thought it was more likely that she'd be angry, volatile, that he'd come away with bruises on his skin as well as his heart. But this, this drawn and empty Kara, he had no strategy to cope with. He didn't even know where to start.

Lee sat down near her on the grass; they were on a hilltop half-a-mile from the Academy hangars, and the whine of Viper engines in atmospheric launch carried to them on the wind. Kara was apparently deaf, both to them and to him, but one look at the unopened bottle beside her warned him that alcohol was not what drowned out the noise. He felt his own mouth open, close, open again, no words coming out because he couldn't find the ones that made sense.

It was Kara who broke the silence after about five minutes. "Remembered this place, huh?"

Her voice was scratchy with disuse. Hadn't she spoken in days? She looked like she hadn't slept, either. "Zak used to bring me here, too," he agreed. "When he came to visit while I was in flight school, he used to spend days parked here, watching the vipers take off, watch maneuvers. When classes were over, I'd come out to meet him, bring my books if I had to study. He'd sit there, asking endless questions about flying fighters, how to do it, what it was like. There wasn't anything about Vipers or flying them that he didn't want to know."

She sat in silence, her face tilted his way if not her eyes, listening; he couldn't tell what she was thinking, so he kept going, kept filling up the silence with memories of Zak. "As a kid, it was all he wanted. I mean - I was the same, but it wasn't all there was to the world, either. I wanted to know about why we had Vipers and Battlestars, about the Cylons, about the past. I wanted to understand them as much as I wanted to fly the ships; but Zak... Zak just wanted wings. More than anything else, I think."

"More than anything," she agreed.

The sky was darkening, turning violet at the highest arc, an aura of flame colors painted over the distant hills. The blushing light fired Kara's hair in tones of gold and copper where the wind stirred it, tinted her skin ruddy. She'd have been beautiful if she wasn't so broken; was beautiful anyway, he found himself thinking. But it hurt to see someone so vivid, so much larger than life, shrunk down so small.

The silence was too heavy. "Want some coffee?" he tried, reached for the knapsack he'd dumped behind him on the grass. The thermos felt warm even through the canvas, and that's when he noticed how cold the air was turning. "Will warm you up."

Kara chuckled, a raspy sound. "Nope. Nectar's better." She waved the bottle at him. "You figured I'd have a good head start on this already, didn't you?"

Lee felt himself shrug. "I would have been on the second bottle by now, but I flew CAP this morning before my leave ticked 'round."

"Then why the coffee?"

Figures she'd ask that. He'd expected her to be drunk, wanted her to be drunk, because then she'd have something, something between her and the grief. It would have been better than the raw emotion, for her. It hadn't been for him. "Sobering you up would have given me something to do."

"You need to do something?" The thin metal cap on the bottle tore away from the seal under the pressure of her fingers, and the wind carried the sharp scent right to him.

Lee extended the metal mugs he'd brought for the coffee, watched her pour a slug into each, and after she took one, he tilted the other straight down his throat, let it burn. Let the honest answer come. "I didn't know what else to do, how else I could help."

Kara tossed back her own shot, let the empty mug dangle from slack fingers. "I don't need help."

The twist of pain must have shown in his broken grin, because she looked away.

"But," she continued, staring off towards the hills, where faint engine sounds proclaimed the returning patrol, "thanks. For wanting to."

He extended the mug again, nodding. "Least I can do, Kara."

She poured a more generous dose for each of them, took a sip and then leaned back on her elbows, legs extended in the shaggy grass, her BDU's hanging off a frame that was visibly leaner than it had been a mere three months ago. Lee let his eyes trace her, appreciating what he saw. That wasn't new. But it had felt guilty before, to admire this woman whom his brother had adored. That wasn't how it felt now.

"I'm leaving the Academy" she said, a little later. The bottle was two-thirds empty, and his head was spinning, and stars were wheeling overhead, vipers cutting between them now and then in lines of silver fire.

"What?"

"Taking a posting."

It took a minute to sink in.

"That bastard" he hissed, clenched his hands around the mug to stop him hurling it. "He got them to give in?"

He'd known, of course, that his father's ire wouldn't end with the funeral. He'd known that all the favors the old man had left to call, he'd be calling them in to try and punish her, to get her drummed out of the fleet, or at least sent to a lousy posting, anything, anywhere that didn't carry the prestige of Sparta. He'd hoped it wouldn't be enough, that Kara's skills and Kara's fire and the inimitable glory of her flying would stop the rot from eating away at her career. He'd been so sure, with Colonel Trevis' support...

"Not exactly," Kara said, shrugged. "Trev's stood up to the pressure; he doesn't want me gone. But there's been... issues raised."

"Like what?" The snap in his voice wasn't aimed at her, but she hunched over her empty mug.

"Questions on whether or not I have the qualifications to instruct, seeing as I've only served one duty posting other than Sparta. Questioning whether I have the range of fleet experience... and some rumors."

It wasn't the first time. When Admiral Ngala's chief of staff had put Kara Thrace forward as a candidate for instructor after only one tour aboard the Kerberos, there'd been rumors, too. Relatively benign ones. Though they hadn't known each other then, Kara'd been infamous when they were both in Sparta's flight programme, and Lee himself had laughed at the idea of the sixty-year-old, shrewd Commander Tylney involved with the volatile twenty-three-going-on-fifteen Starbuck. Somehow he knew this wasn't quite like that.

"Rumors," he prompted, when she wasn't going to elaborate without it. She reached for the bottle.

"Apparently, I'm Trev's lover. Apparently, that's the only reason he's kept me on here. Apparently" and her voice hissed and broke until she gulped nectar straight out of the flask, "apparently that's why Zak Adama ended his relationship with me, because he found out I was frakking my boss."

Lee wrenched the bottle out of her grasp, swigged it himself until there was little more than an inch left in the bottom. "He's asked you to resign?" he tried eventually, handed her the remainder of the nectar.

She stared down the bottle's throat, then upended it into her mouth, swallowed. He could see the dampness shine on her lip. "No. I offered."

He shook his head, kept shaking it. Couldn't believe she was giving in. "No," he insisted, "you don't let him win. Kara -"

She turned to him then, her face lit up with moonlight and frustration. "You don't get it, Lee. I don't want to be here. I don't want to frakking be here _alo-_"

His arms went around her before the word could ring in the air, her face tucked into his neck, her fingers relaxing the fists that had been her reflex response and then closing just as tightly in the front of his jacket. Her hair feathered across his cheek and he felt the tears then, seeping down under the edge of his collar. Her chest heaved, and he held her tighter and kissed her hair and rubbed a hand up and down her spine until it stopped.

"_Aurora_," Kara said when she could speak again, withdrawing from him as far as his arm around her shoulders allowed. "Rhys Marrol's ship; I'm posted there as his lead pilot."

"Scout ship - Kara, you'll be so isolated, you shouldn't -"

"No, Lee. That's exactly what I need. I need to get away from here and... be the lone wolf, again. Remember how."

"You don't have to be alone, Kara. You might have lost Zak, but you don't have to lose me, too." It felt so important that she understand that he wasn't going anywhere, that he didn't blame her. It was necessary, as necessary as air, or water, that she realise that he, that Lee Adama had not cast her aside. Would not.

She shook her head, wriggled herself further out of his grasp, rolled the empty nectar bottle through the night-black grass. "You're his brother, Lee. You would have been my brother today. If I have to face that fact for the rest of my life -" she stopped. Shook her head again, her face shadowed so he couldn't see anything of it but a pair of too-wide, too-shiny eyes. "Besides, you're posted on a Battlestar, and thanks to ... circumstances, it'll be ten years before I get that privilege. I'd still have to be on my own, Lee. Distance wouldn't make any frakking difference to that."

"We could resign" he offered before thinking, voicing the idea that had only recently dawned on him, the one that seemed like the answer to everything to do with the fleet and his father and the shadow that hung over both of them. "Always work for flyers with fleet training. Aerospace are always looking for test pilots."

Kara stared at him. "Leave the fleet." Her head moved sideways as though she were about to shake it again, and froze there."You're serious?" When he nodded, she exploded, leaped up and hurled the empty bottle viciously down the slope. "No. No frakking way, Lee. I'm leaving Sparta for my own reasons, but I'll be damned if I let your old man take the fleet away from me too."

He could understand that concept. "Okay. Okay - you don't want to leave. I get it." He fidgeted with the knapsack, the not-quite hot thermos of coffee, and sighed, reached into the bottom of the bag for his weapon of last resort. The bottle was square, full of ambrosia that the moonlight turned ghostly gray in the glass. He twisted the cap off almost viciously, wondering why it suddenly hurt that his father was part of her decisions at all. Or maybe what hurt was that she didn't even seem to hear his thoughtless use of 'we'.

"No, you don't get it, Lee. You don't get it at all. You don't get what this job means to me. Do you know, I haven't been up there since..." she broke off, snatched the bottle out of his grip and took a generous slug straight out. "They wouldn't let me up. Trev revoked my flight status. I've had to... sit here for three months, and deal with this whole thing, over and over, in my head. If I could fly, I could forget it, for a while."

He watched as she downed another mouthful. "Forget Zak?" It wasn't meant to be cruel.

She froze, then lifted the ambrosia to her mouth again. "I'll never forget Zak," she hissed over the burn that had to be in her throat.

"What happened, Kara?"

It was the question he'd wanted to ask for months now, wanted to know. Needed to know, if he was ever going to deal with why he had never thought of his brother's girl as his future sister. It was a question she didn't want to answer, if the way she drained a third of the bottle before she lowered it was any indication.

"Kara?" Lee pried the bottle from her grip when she sat abruptly on the grass, her knees tucked up like a kid's against her chest. "What happened with Zak?"

"It would... would have hurt" she said eventually, her voice with unaccustomed tremolo, too soft to be hers. "It would have eaten him up, you know, watching me fly when he couldn't do it himself."

"Zak knew he wouldn't pass?"

She didn't answer.

Lee took a long pull at the bottle, not sure if the hot feeling in him was alcohol or anger or hope. "Zak knew he didn't have the chops, didn't he, Kara? Did he blame you?"

The mop of moon-whitened hair shook slowly. "No. But he couldn't have handled it, all the same, that all he ever wanted was to fly, but that he'd never be good enough for the old man. That he'd never be -"

"Good enough for you," Lee finished when she stopped, mid-sentence.

"That didn't matter to me," she flared, snatched the ambrosia out of his grasp.

"I know that," he flared back, insistent, "because I know YOU. He knew you, too, Kara," he heard himself insisting. " He loved you. But I guess he just loved flying more."

"Right", she said, but the tone was so sardonic; he wished he could see her face, to see what the frak she meant. But she stood, wavered on her feet, held the bottle out of his reach when he rose quickly to steady her. "That's only logical, after all."

She took the bottle with her when she left.

**+ 6 days, or 200 FTL jumps.**

Most of the pilots hadn't even made it out of the ready room this time, Racetrack realised, simply landed in the first seats they could reach after they hauled their bruised and exhausted bodies out of cockpits, and stayed in them. Only CAG was still standing, his features fuzzy with stubble - or was that just her vision blurring? - as he leaned against the podium.

"I don't have anything new to say," he said eventually after going through about half the list of things he had been saying for days. "But you're all going above and beyond, here. I... well done. And" the pause was long enough for the raptor ECO to follow his line of sight and discover she'd been wrong, that Starbuck was also still standing, leaning against the hatchway, staring back. "And be careful out there."

Starbuck smiled, but it was a dimmer wattage than usual. "Twenty minutes, people," she agreed, her voice rough. Quite a few of the occupants of the ready room didn't even move.

Racetrack wasn't even sure exactly how it occurred, but with twenty minutes and no particular place she had to be right then, she found herself drawn to the way the two captains, now leaning easily against the duty board, were smiling. She didn't know either of them, the new CAG nor the lead of Bravo squadron who was sort of a D-CAG by default. But she'd had no idea that they knew each other. Refugees from different ships, their flight suits still marked with patches from other battlegroups, they looked like old friends. Maybe it was fatigue that loosened her tongue, but she was surprised when she heard herself speak. "You two look cozy."

Starbuck seemed to stiffen a little, and her eyes went flat, but Apollo let his features stretch in a tired grin. "Starbuck and I were at the Academy together, lieutenant."

"Really?" it was an unfamiliar voice, from her left: one of the ex-Aurora wing, a tall, lanky jokester with the unlikeliest call sign. Fatty? or something. "Buck's never been big on history, CAG. What was she like as a nugget?"

"Infamous" CAG answered promptly, and Starbuck's grin reappeared.

"I think the word you're looking for, Apollo, is 'notorious'."

"Well, if there's a word for the biggest troublemaker that ever graduated from Sparta, that's the word I'd pick for you."

she made a sound like half a laugh. "You didn't know me that well."

"I didn't need to. Everybody knew about _Starbuck_."

By this stage, more than half the pilots still slumped in their seats were listening, leaning towards the captains, amused by the back and forth. Sleep wasn't possible unless waking was impossible and since they only had seventeen minutes left, this was a better way to spend it than thinking. She added her mite to the chorus of inquiry. "She was a problem child, sir?"

Apollo turned a look that was part amusement, part mischief on his friend, and Starbuck visibly rolled her eyes, lifted a hand in mock carelessness. "Go on, at least this way I'll get to hear what crap you're feeding these kids, Lee."

"Truth straight from the scrolls, Kara!" he objected, chuckled, turned back to the pilots; the thread of humor was a spark of energy in all of them. It started between the two captains, ran through the room. "Captain Thrace, back when she was 'cadet' Thrace, had a history of student pranks. Everyone knew it was her, but she never got caught, and nobody could ever prove it. But she'd be there, watching from the sidelines with everyone else when the target got tagged, and the grin on your face, Kara," he tilted his chin back towards her, "I don't think anyone ever thought you weren't directly responsible."

Starbuck constructed an expression of artful innocence, lifted her hands helplessly. Apollo grinned. "One time," he went on, playing to the crowd, "she and her unknown cohorts dismantled a visiting Colonel's shuttle, and rebuilt it, full working order and ready to fly ... inside the Gymnasium."

The laughter was genuine. Gymnasiums didn't have doors big enough to fly shuttles through.

Starbuck grinned. "That was fun. They had to pull it apart again to take it outside. It took two days."

"What I never figured out," CAG remarked, "was how it only took you and your minions one night to put it there."

"Genius."

"Modesty, too."

She just grinned.

"What else did you do, Boss?" A raptor pilot called out; was it Brough? Wingclip, anyway, his call sign was. Heads swiveled back to the duty board, and Starbuck shook her head.

"Me? I did nothing."

"How about the footprint thing, Starbuck?" Apollo's elbow nudged hers.

Her face broke, laughter spilling out into the room. "Oh Gods, I'd almost forgotten that..."

"It was classic," Apollo said, shaking his head in astonished memory, his mouth jerking at the corners to restrain a smile. "One morning at Reveille, there were these huge black cardboard footprints, trailing up the side of the _Lykourgia_; all ten floors, these meter-long footprints walking right up the building. Commander Ephors came out for morning jerks with the rest of the officers, took one look at these tracks, and announced 'Those footprints have to come down!'."

Starbuck was laughing into her hand, her shoulders shaking violently. Apollo was getting into the tale now, his hands on his hips in imitation of the long-ago CO of Picon's Academy. "So we all went on training, and at sunset we went back for evening roll-call, and the quadrangle lights went on, and there's these footprints. Turned back the other way, walking down."

The image hit all the occupants of the ready room at about the same time, and the laughter was uproarious. Captain Adama was no exception. "And Commander Ephors got up to call the companies, caught sight of it and just... just..." Shaking his head, he motioned at the giggling Starbuck, who had tears in her eyes, to continue.

"Nearly pissed himself, I swear. As it was, the whole school cracked up." It took a few minutes before anyone could talk enough to ask, but it didn't do them any good. "How it was done is a trade secret, boys and girls," she grinned at them.

"It's a pity he wasn't still there when you went back, Starbuck" Apollo commented. "I'm sure he would have liked to know."

"If he'd still been there, I'd never have been invited back, and you know it." She grinned. "Ephors might have had a good sense of humor, but he figured I was a bad influence."

"Yeah, I think he might have balked at you training up whole new classes of Starbucks to plague future commanders..." The thought obviously amused the CAG, but Starbuck closed down a little.

"You were a teacher at Sparta?" the lanky viper pilot, Tubby - yes, Tubby! - said, his eyes bright with interest as he looked at his former boss. "But you're only twenty-seven..."

Starbuck shrugged. Apollo, obviously chastened, shot her an apologetic glance. "Captain Thrace didn't just have a history of good pranks, Wayre. She also graduated with the highest flight rating in more than twenty-nine years."

"And the lowest scores in Political Science," she rolled her eyes. "Nobody wanted my company for long on a battlestar, Tubby. I think they assigned me to Sparta because they figured I'd be less difficult to deal with outside cramped quarters."

"Then how'd'ya end up on the '_Rora_?" another transfer pilot inquired.

Apollo was looking at her, his expression pained, and Starbuck's mouth twisted, but then she grinned, and her eyes danced. "Oh, that part was simple. Colonel Marrol lost a bet."

"Now that," Tubby remarked, laughing "I can very well believe. Do you ever frakkin' lose at the triad table, Buck?"

"Sure I do, Tubby" she replied, and started to follow the CAG out of the room. The rest of her reply floated back in her wake. "Just not to you."

**+ 6 days 12 hours, or 230 FTL jumps**

"Casualty report, sir."

"At ease, Captain." His son looked worn, his skin pale under the lights, as tired as any of them. "How are you holding up, Lee?"

"Better than my Viper," Lee muttered. "I think most of the pilots are hitting the wall now, or will be soon."

"I'm considering boosting essential personnel with stimulants. How do you think they'll handle that?"

Commander Adama wondered why the thought made Lee look more worried, just for a moment; the younger man shrugged. "Bad for pilots. Hyperactivity sets back reaction time, not enhances it."

"Exhaustion doesn't make them react any more quickly either, though. I'll talk to Cottle in a jump or two... if it's necessary."

"If it's necessary", the new CAG echoed, rubbed at his eyes. "Sorry Dad. Casualties haven't increased in a few jumps, I think the panic reaction's wearing down at about the same rate as our reflexes. It'd be hard to keep their morale up if it weren't -"

Abruptly Lee stopped speaking, and Adama looked up from the clipboarded note on Viper attrition to see his son's face hardening. "By your tone and expression, I gather you were going to say "if it weren't for Captain Thrace."

Lee didn't respond.

"I'm well aware of her skills, son. I've read the reports. And before... when I first heard about her from Zak, I made inquiries. She's a superb pilot."

"She's a good leader," Lee countered.

"She has charisma," Adama hedged, then sighed. "We don't have time to discuss her qualities, or her failings, Captain. Part of the reason I called you here was to remind you that you need to maintain command, Lee. No matter the circumstances of your ... association with Thrace, she's your direct subordinate, not your friend. Not under these circumstances. You need to remain professional."

Lee glared at him. "Like you did?"

"What?" He couldn't help snapping. "What do you mean?"

"It was pretty damn professional, that hatchet-job you did on her career, Dad. Rumors and all, I was impressed." Lee's eyes were icy.

"We don't have time for this." Adama stood, feeling frustration push back the tide of fatigue; unfortunately, it would only come back again, higher and harder. "I made my choices with regards to Captain Thrace because her behavior was unprofessional; I responded in kind. She shouldn't have been allowed to remain in the fleet, but she has, and now I have to deal with her. And so do you. And both of us," he said, letting temper emphasize the words, "are going to be strictly professional."

Lee's infinitesimal head-shake didn't hide the way his son's jaw clenched, biting back fury. "Will that be all, Commander?"

"Dismissed, Captain." The CAG was nearly at the door when he remembered that in eight minutes, Lee would be out there again, and there might be no second chances. "Lee -"

Apollo paused but didn't turn.

"Be careful out there, son."

The set of the younger man's shoulders loosened, and he turned, smiled; it was not the full smile he remembered from happier days, but echoed in it was his mother's smile. And Zak's. "I will, Dad."

**+6 days, 22 hours**

The aching in every limb - two hundred-forty-odd hard landings worth of bruises and impact shock - should have made her tired, but the stimulants, the stimulants were crawling in her blood and arcing little sparks under her skin. Hypersensitized and close to fury, Starbuck hissed air and water in through her teeth and tried to let the shower drain some of her tension away.

Until her body came down, she wouldn't be able to shut her mind down, either. And right now, she didn't want to think.

Lee had been in the ready room as she'd passed it on her way to the head; he'd been wiping dead pilots off the duty board and replacing them with the names of her former shipmates, and she knew she should go in there and explain to him not to pair up Tubby and Pacer on patrol, because they'd burn way too much fuel in their private little pissing contests. She knew, too, she should apologize for her insubordination, out there, when they'd destroyed_ that ship._

Not yet. He wasn't ready to hear it, and she wasn't sure he would be for a while longer, not if the last ten hours or so had been anything to judge by.

Sliding back into the easy camaraderie of four years ago, another life, had made the transfer to _Galactica_ feel a little like coming home, but for the last dozen or so jumps and the moments of downtime snatched between them, Lee had turned the temperature way the frak down, and she hadn't known why. It had eaten at her for hours, his sudden distance, which had made it so frakking easy to turn on him when just as abruptly, he'd tried to appeal to her as a friend again, to get her to take the frakking stims.

_And men call _us_ the indecisive sex. Bastard._

It hadn't been much of a blow-up. No exchange of fists - they were both too sore for that, if her own body was any indication. And of course, they'd laughed it off. Because it had been funny, too funny, funny enough to frakking cry over, under the circumstances. But the look in his face, when she'd said, unthinkingly honest: 'we're not friends, you're the CAG had not been funny at all.

None of it made sense. She might be awake, might be able to feel life coursing a little too fast in every vein, but her mind was stuck in tired, too-insistent loops.

Kara turned the water up a little harder and hotter, hissed as it pounded against bruised skin. "Frakking cylons."

"Copy that," she heard him say, not even needing to turn to know it was Lee. "That's about the size of it."

"Glad you agree, Captain," She leaned her folded forearms against the tiled wall, let the hot water stream down on the back of her head, her neck. She didn't want to deal with Adamas right now, not when her skin felt thin as cobwebs and the strength in her muscles was an illusion.

His shower turned on, the one next to hers, and she heard him let out a breath in frustration. "Don't do that, Kara."

"Do what, sir?" Leaving her tongue on automatic was going to make him mad, but it was easier than thinking about the things she really wanted to say.

"It's just us in here," he snarled at her, flung a hand at the rest of the vacant room. "You don't have to play soldiers right now."

"Lords of _frakking_ Kobol" she snapped back, without a hint of regret for the irreverence of it, "make up your mind, Adama. I've already got frakking whiplash from bouncing your viper on the deck. You've been pulling rank on me for what feels like days, only I wouldn't have a frakking clue how long it's been. Then you pull that little chummy episode in the hangar bay, follow it up with 'Captain Thrace' or 'Starbuck' ever since. Now you walk in here and all of a sudden, I'm_ Kara_?" His eyes slid guiltily away, and she sent hers up to the condensation-dotted ceiling.

"We had a job to do," he offered, but it sounded weak; she turned in the water to glare at him again. "Frak, Kara - all of a sudden I'm your boss, and I'm supposed to maintain command, but... its you, and it's me, and I forget."

"Maintain command, huh?" She narrowed her gaze, saw his jaw work. "I suppose the little pep talk concluded with instructions to keep things strictly professional, too, didn't it?"

Lee's face went white. "How the frak did you know?"

Kara drew in a shuddering breath, reminding herself - or trying to - that Lee wasn't who she should be angry at. "Let me put it simply, Apollo. You're not the first of your family who got served with that little slice of hypocrisy. I've heard it before."

"Which obviously means it didn't work so well on Zak," Lee rubbed his face, stripped water from his eyes. "I'm sorry, Kara."

"Zak wasn't fighting a frakking war at the time." It didn't make sense to claw holes in him and defend him at the same time, but that's the way they'd always been. And that familiarity was suddenly more logical than everything else since the end of the world.

"And he wasn't your immediate superior, either." He went back to his ablutions, but the way he shifted uneasily under the water told her that he wasn't finished. "It threw me off, what you said in the hangar deck," Lee continued eventually. "About not being friends."

"You needed to remember that," she shrugged. "When it's an order, give me a frakking order, Lee."

"Yes, sir" he snapped, but threw her the hint of a grin. "But that wasn't what I meant."

"Then what did you mean?"

He hesitated, reached over and shut off his water, turned away to grab his towel. She frowned at his naked back until he sighed. "I meant that it threw me because that's what the old man told me. That I wasn't your friend, I was your boss."

She really didn't want to agree with Commander Adama. "That's probably how he'd prefer it to stay."

"It's not what I want, though."

She shut off her own shower, thought about that. Remembered that it hadn't been an order that made her pull the trigger on the Olympic Carrier but the instinct, inescapable in her tired and overstimulated head, to stick with Lee. "No," she agreed, finally. "Me either." Turning away from the faucets, she found a towel being proffered, smiled as she took it. "So what do you want, Lee?"

His answer spun her down in a dizzy mental spiral, her heart rising contrarily to her throat.

"I want to know if you're still with Zak."

Thank you kindly for the follows and favourites =) I appreciate it. I'd love reviews if anyone has the chance!


	4. Chapter 4

**Title**: **Eris and Aurora, 4/6**

**Length**: 4850 words, roughly, this part.

**Rating**: M. There is Pilot!Sex

**Characters**: Kara/Lee, Adama.

**Notes**: AU, begins during the mini-series. Occasional backstory flashbacks. No spoilers for anything beyond the episode Water at this point. Unbeta'd. Naturally, characters and concepts are property of RDM / SciFi / Larson.

Chapter 4

**-2 years, 4 months**

Her last night at Sparta was the worst.

It had started out better than most, better than anything since Lee's final, reluctant departure, because Trev gave her wings back and the other instructors had taken her back up, Vipers in perfect formation. The feeling of relief had been indescribable and it had taken all of half a minute for the dullness of months in the simulator to hone itself back into razor edges: Starbuck, back where she belonged.

The trouble started once she was back on the ground.

Kara was never sure if it was the flight that stripped the scabs off the wounds or the idea that in a few hours, everything in her life that had to do with Zak would be gone. Some combination of the two, perhaps? At any rate, the influx of memories had started the moment she walked in the door of her sparse little domicile, each colliding painfully with her heart or squeezing air out of her lungs.

Zak, his feet up on her coffee table, tossing the astrogation textbook aside to pull her across his lap. Zak's tanks and tracks in a messy heap on the floor beside her couch, with his briefs hanging comically from the television aerial. Zak, snatching flight assessments out of her fingers and hauling her down the hall, ignoring her protests. Zak making a mess of her tiny office as he panicked over an essay due the next day, freaking out until she gave in and helped him get started.

Zak's voice, and his father's, from the televiewer in the next room, arguing over whether she was a benefit or a distraction. Zak's coffee cup colliding with the wall of the kitchenette, chipping plaster and spraying bitter fluid and shards of ceramic all over the room, while he snarled about her suggestion they be more discreet - at least in public. Zak pinching the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb, then stalking out of the room, muttering 'I need to talk to Lee'.

Zak's back disappearing out the door after the look of betrayal in his eyes had robbed her of speech. Zak's incandescent fury, his bitter, mocking words. Zak's final, parting 'you can't do this to me'. Zak's empty seat at the hearing, an accusation all its own, and one which cut so deeply she'd just had to give something back -

She drew a deep breath, then another, tried to force herself back into calmness. It seemed ironic that her automatic choice of method was right out of oxygen-deprivation training. Wasn't that the whole point? Everything she did revolved around Vipers and flying; everyone she knew. Zak had started out that way, but for her, the reasons had changed. And all these months without flying had taught her that perhaps Zak's hadn't.

That didn't mean it hurt any less. She only had to open her eyes, see his back once more disappearing out the front door, to know that his departure that day, and what came after, had stripped her of more than just a different kind of future.

The apartment was nearly bare of personal possessions; a few rudely-framed canvasses and a traditional geminon mosaic were all that remained on the walls, too heavy to take to Aurora. They'd be freighted, along with two crates of household things and a duffel of civilian clothes, to the tiny rat-hole of an apartment she'd found on Caprica. Everything else was packed, except two little bronze figurines, their faces worn shiny with her devotion, and the photograph of everything she'd lost: lover and brother.

Too aching to eat or sleep, she poured herself a drink from the bottle left prominently on her kitchenette - thanks, Trev - and sat down to drown the thought, the treacherous thought, that the reason that future was gone was that it should have been the other way around: brother and lover, instead.

**+6 days, 22 hours**

Rhys Marrol felt only the slightest jarring as the raptor touched down on _Galactica_'s flight deck, nodded approval to the young pilot, an attractive, slender woman with the gold skin and sloe eyes that suggested Canceran descent. He didn't know her name. He didn't know many people aboard the Battlestar at all, save for the twenty-odd pilots that had been transferred off his deck. The loss had felt like losing a limb; _Aurora_ was an attack wing, and without fighters, it was little more than a recon platform. His brave little ship was wasted without her Vipers. It was galling, too, to have to call for a Raptor from _Galactica_ to answer the Commander's summons.

He stifled his frustrations, returned the salutes offered him as he climbed out the Raptor's hatch. Tigh, the XO, awaited him.

"You're looking better, Marrol," the other man offered as they headed up towards CIC. "Still a hell of a shiner, though."

"I'll take bruises over the alternative," Rhys shrugged. "What's this about, Colonel? With all my senior officers either transferred or in sickbay or worse, surely whatever it is could have been handled on the wireless?"

"The old man didn't say," Tigh hedged. "He's got a lot on his plate. But if I'd had to hazard a guess -"

"Starbuck," Marrol shook his head. "Thought I'd made it perfectly clear -"

"Yeah, well, these days 'clear' is relative." Tigh looked as tired as the rest of them, but the eyes were tinged yellow as well as bloodshot. "I can't tell you what he wants to know, Rhys, but I can tell you that it's not personal. Until he feels comfortable with who's leading his flight wings, he'll keep asking questions. That's his job."

Biting back on the remark that sprang instantaneously to his lips, Marrol simply shook his head. If the Galactica's XO couldn't tell where his boss was crossing the lines between professional and personal, then in all likelihood, Commander Adama couldn't, either. Then again, the Colonel had to admit, how can something that relates to one's children ever be 'impersonal'? He didn't know. He'd never had kids, and now most likely never would.

Tigh left him at the door of Adama's quarters, a short walk from the bustle of CIC, and before knocking, Rhys threw a considering glance at the bulkheads around him. Maybe that was the thing that made the difference in battlestar commanders, that they'd forgotten what it was like to go on instinct because their ships didn't really feel like ships. You couldn't tell you were flying anymore. Not like his ship, not like the '_Rora_, where only one set of hands was needed at the helm and you could know every crew member by name. One day he might have commanded one of these boats, if the Cylons hadn't come. As he knocked on Adama's hatch, it occurred to Rhys that - if for that reason alone - he wasn't sorry that the day would never come.

"Colonel Marrol," Adama offered him a half-smile, returned his salute. "Please, Rhys - this is completely informal. Sit down. How's the head?"

"Better, considering I got to spend most of the last few days awake," Marrol shrugged, slipped into the offered armchair. "Being sedated while the first hundred-or-so jumps went down made me want to crawl out of my skin, if I could only wake up long enough to figure how to do it."

"I can imagine. But my CMO insisted; sorry about that."

"Where'd you find him, anyhow? Cottle shows a rough face, but he's a good doctor. Wish I had one like him instead of my overeager young medics."

Adama grinned. "Give them time. I think it takes years for the training to wear down to the point where the bedside manner starts to fit inside our cramped quarters. As for the Doc - major Cottle's been with us for about six months. His final tour, too, it would have been."

It would have been too easy to say something highly lacking in tact, so Rhys took the proffered cup of coffee, decided he wanted to get the arguments over with sooner rather than later. "How are my pilots integrating?"

The silence lasted no more than a breath. "Fine. You've had a good crew."

Stop hedging, Adama. "They had a good lead pilot."

That brought a wry smile. "Is it that obvious?"

"That you can't get your head around the idea that Starbuck's a good officer? yes. It's that obvious."

For a moment, Rhys thought the Commander was going to turn cold and angry on him; the glare certainly didn't bode well. But after another short silence, the older man sighed. "I won't say it isn't hard to reconcile what I know about her with what everyone else is telling me. But I'll accept your word if you'll give me good reasons."

"She's not textbook," the colonel admitted, wrapping his fingers around the coffee mug. "But you and I both know that the best officers, the best leaders never are. She manages pilots with an ease I wouldn't have expected in someone her age; she earned their respect first and then their trust. And she takes no crap. But I would have thought you already had the best reasons" Rhys pointed out. He turned his glance obviously to the prominent photograph on the nearby desk.

Adama rose, abruptly; his fists were clenched by his sides, walked across to the desk and stared at that photograph. "I had two sons, Colonel."

"You still have one - thanks to Starbuck."

"That's one less than I might have - also thanks to Starbuck."

Rhys really didn't want to get into apportioning blame, but - "Look, Commander, I know as much of the story as Deak Trevis could tell me. She shouldn't have been involved with your kid. Your kid shouldn't have been involved with her. But what ultimately happened to him was an accident."

"Accidents happen. But she contributed to this one."

"So did your son."

"He was just a kid. He wasn't responsible."

"She didn't force him to get involved with her. He made an adult's choice."

Adama said nothing. Rhys set his coffee cup down with a preparatory deep breath. "We never knew each other real well before now, Commander, but as Kara's CO - former CO - let me give you some friendly advice. Either give her a free hand, and trust her and your CAG to work out a partnership, or send her back to _Aurora_ with me. She's volatile and unpredictable, but that's what makes her a brilliant pilot. But she's also brittle. If you think for one minute that what happened with your son didn't damn near break her -"

"I'm glad to hear she has a guilty conscience," Adama muttered. "She should."

Marrol shook his head. "My professional advice, sir, is that you reassign Captain Thrace as my XO. Your Kelly is a good officer, but he's an LSO, not a pilot. He doesn't have the tactical experience to stand second in CIC, or take the helm if I'm out. And if you can't deal with Starbuck, then make it easier for all of us. Send her back to _Aurora_."

"We need all our pilots," the older man said, quietly. "And we need them on _Galactica_, at least for the time being. This situation's... painful, Colonel. I should assign my son to your ship, so he's not under my direct command, but I can't, because we need pilots. I should also simply acknowledge that Thrace is his deputy by rank and experience and leave it at that, but I can't. I know that my personal considerations are affecting my judgment here, but it's not unjustified. She was a poor officer at Sparta. She wasn't professional there. I need a D-CAG I can trust."

"Forgive me for pointing this out, Commander, but the past is dead. If you want to know who Starbuck is, you should ask her. And you should probably ask your son."

**one breath later**

Kara stood in the shower recess, her limbs traced with water and her form wrapped in the dull blue towel that the harsh light bleached to gray. She was the same, but not the same; her eyes were as transparent and revealing as he remembered them, everything about her was just like he remembered, only different too, as though some process had stripped away ephemerals he'd never even seen and left her more essentially herself. Hardened.

And softened. "Zak's dead," she said quietly.

"Yes," he agreed, the wealth of pain in those words making him sure of her answer, but he needed to hear her say it. "That doesn't mean you don't still belong to him, Kara."

She was staring at him, her mouth trembling. "I -"

"He left you." Lee took one step closer, saw her wrap her arms around herself.

"You're his brother, Lee..."

He ignored the reprimand. "Zak's brother" he agreed. "Zak's brother, Kara. Not yours."

"You were going to be..."

"But I'm not." That same familiar sensation he'd always fought down in her presence tightened in his gut, but this time Lee welcomed it. The thought and sensation and capitulation hummed through him: _notyourbrother_, _neveryourbrother_. He knew what he wanted now. But Kara? "You don't want to be my sister, do you?"

"I was supposed to," she choked out. "I tried -"

"Are you his, still, Kara?" His hands were on her biceps, grip urgent. "Or is it over?"

"But he's dead!"

The cry was anguished.

_Say it, say what I've expected you to say for years, get it over with. Damn you, Kara_. "Then how would it have been different if he'd lived?"

She stared at him, and her eyes went wide. Two words made him suddenly realize that nothing was ever certain, even after the end of the world. Two words gave him hope. "It wouldn't."

Maybe miracles did happen. "Then ask me that question again, Kara," he suggested, took a step closer so he could feel her warmth in the air against his damp skin.

She didn't bother. Her mouth brushed his swiftly, her breath escaping in a gasp as his fingers tightened further on her arms, and then she kissed him again. More. Her mouth against his, her hands coming up without hesitation, skimming across the damp skin of his sides, the explosion of triumph and heat in his gut: three sensations that together sent him into overload. He yanked her hard against him, twisted fingers into her dripping hair, felt her fingernails, short and sharp, dig into his ribs. Ignored them.

They moved, still kissing with abandon so complete that he didn't realize they were moving, until her back hit the wall between the faucets and their hips met in much more proximity, jolting them both breathless from the conjunction of their mouths.

"Lee," she was sighing, her eyes closed.

"I never wanted you for a sister, Kara." He closed the fingers of his free hand on the tuck of her towel, the inner swells of her breasts resting against the back of his fingers.

Her eyelids fluttered up, opened, and one hand came to rest over his. "I - guessed."

"But you wanted me for a brother?"

"I would have wanted you as a brother," she replied quietly, "I couldn't frak us up that way."

All the answer he could make to that was to kiss her again, kiss her hard until her hand came up to curve along his jaw and he could untuck that towel. She let it fall, caught between the curve of her backside and the wall, drifting against the back of her legs; she wrenched his own towel loose and dropped it in a puddle, and they both groaned: every inch of skin on skin struck sparks of sensation. Stims could make for sensation so sharp it was almost painful, but here it was just relief.

Lee ran a hand down from her neck, tracing the line of her breastbone, felt her chest inflate under his touch. The movement urged their hips together again, and the sensation of his arousal bumping hard against her belly made his eyes swim upwards in his head. "Gods, Kara -"

The noise of the hatch cycling open made them both freeze, silent; still screened by the wall of basins and mirrors, whoever it was couldn't see them either. When they heard the click of a toilet-cubicle door lock, Lee let out a breath, stepped back and picked up his towel. "Get dressed" he said quietly.

Kara's face paled; her fingers groped unsuccessfully for the edge of her towel. "Lee -"

"Dress," he hissed back, turned away to look for his own clean clothes. He had to get them out of here, get them someplace where there would be no interruptions, because if he even looked at her, the heat was going to make him lose his head. Four and a half years of thinking about her like this, of trying desperately not to think of her like this and failing, of finding other willing bodies instead and never quite finding satisfaction in them... he had little control to spare.

She was jerking on her sweats when he risked a glimpse at her; her face was rigid. Lee didn't realize what that meant at first, so intent on thinking of somewhere in this great metal labyrinth of a ship where they could be sure of privacy that the sharpness of her movements didn't register until she moved ahead of him towards the door and didn't stop.

Idiot, he snarled at himself. It was pointless saying anything, because she wouldn't listen, but he could show her -

Twenty-two meters down the corridor, there was a hatch marked "Senior Officers Locker", and she was headed for it. Their bunks, which would be surrounded by other occupied bunks. He lengthened his stride, wrapped his fingers around her arm again and hauled her further on, past the cramped cube that was his office, past the alert pilot's locker and the five standby flyers sleeping in their suits, past the great double hatch that led down to the flight pod, all the while ignoring her hissed invective and recalcitrant steps. One short flight of stairs down, a left turn and a right - thank frak they made battlestars off near-identical patterns - and he found it: the records locker. An office-cum-supply room, standard fittings of various filing cabinets, a locked storeroom and a desk. And an outer door that locked, or unlocked, only to command ranking codes: the XO's, the commander's, the CMO's... and his.

She was swinging at him the moment the door slid shut. He'd expected it, made use of opportunity: blocked her punch and used the momentum of it to swing her around, wrap her own arm across her chest as he dragged her full length against him, back to his front. Before she could lift a heel and use it on him, he leaned her into the door, pressed his face into her neck. Bit gently just below her ear.

Kara shuddered. "You bastard," she whispered, her frame still tense, but that wouldn't last long.

"I'm sorry," he agreed, lips against her throat. "It wasn't meant to sound like a rejection, Kara." He brought his free hand up, traced the line of her hip down the front of her thigh, felt the muscles quiver through the sweats.

"Yeah, well, it did."

Lee turned her around in his grip, eased her away from the door. "I'm sorry" he repeated. Slid the fingertips of one hand across her back, tanks dragging at his fingers. Her mouth slipped open, and he took advantage, hauled her into a kiss as fiery and consuming as the earlier ones had been. Desire was volatile enough on its own, but this peculiar cocktail of stims and need and_ Kara, finally_! ... he was on the ragged edge of control, and it felt good.

The precise moment when she surrendered to it too was obvious, because she went pliant against him, strong fingers winding themselves in his shirts as her hips pressed back against his brazenly. More invitation than he needed, really; Lee slid hands inside her sweats, cupping her ass to grind her against him. She freed one hand and sneaked it up under the edges of his tanks, nails tracing across his skin just sharply enough to make him growl.

"Right," she said against his mouth, then she was kissing him again, her tongue brushing his, flickering against his lips. Her hand moved again on his chest, moving cloth with it, extending the caress beyond the compass of her palm: his tanks seemed part of her, brushing up against him. Every iota of friction added to the stimulation of it, and Lee couldn't help but groan.

"Here," he said abruptly, pulling back and leading her to the desk; she moved lightly in his hands when he lifted her to the edge of it. "Lie back."

"Old-fashioned, Apollo?" she murmured as she complied, but he was running hands over her sweatshirt, fingers seeking the smooth curves underneath the fabric, and whatever her objections were, they were lost in her sudden gasp. "Gods -"

He didn't bother to run the zip down far, slid it to just below her breasts as he bent over her, shuffling the fabric aside with his cheek and nose. Searching her out, nuzzling between fleecy lining and skin, tasting her sweat. Her head slid back further, and his hands sought lower, lower. Over the cloth, but she was hot and wet enough that he could feel it anyway. He pressed in, as though nothing lay between his fingers and her want, and she cried out.

"Lee, let me -"

"Let me," he corrected her, tugged sharply at the drawstring of her sweats as his head drifted back across her chest, finding the other nipple under the veil of material, teasing it with his teeth. He edged the waist of her sweats down slowly, let the cloth brush her belly, drag across her ass. No underwear underneath, he found, and it made him laugh against her skin. He pulled back, let his weight rest on one arm as he looked down at her: one straining breast half-bared, taut peak edging the lapel of her sweatshirt aside. Flat, flexing belly, wedge of dark blonde curls below it, the merest glimpse of her heat visible above the shoved-down sweats. And up again, to her face: flushed with heat, eyes shiny, expression impatient and full of fire. "Gods, you look beautiful."

"I could look better," she murmured, gravel in the voice; she reached for her zipper.

"Leave it," he husked back, and bent to kiss her throat. "Skin's nothing, Kara. What's beautiful is that its yours."

His fingers probed again, this time under the cloth, and she moaned. "Frak. Frak, Lee -"

Simple, after that. She kicked off a shoe, slid one leg out of the sweats, and he pushed his own pants down; the bare leg curved around his ass, and he let her pull him in, and_ in_, and_ finally_ -

Lee tried to go slow, but there wasn't time; tried to savor it, but every moment burned into him till there wasn't any danger he'd forget. Tried to watch her, to tease out every instant of pleasure in her, but Kara came maddeningly fast, her body surrendering even as she urged him, taunted him on with her hips. It nearly undid him, but he grit his teeth against the delicious tug of her body around him, rode her through the tide of it, made her hotter and slicker even as they went. "More," he told her between breaths. "Again, Kara."

Her mouth dropped open as he shifted her, tilted her hips up sharply to receive him, and then time disappeared while they collided and drifted and collided again, pace quickening with their pulses. Kara broke just when he couldn't bear much more, her voice keening his name in his ear, and he let go at last, _oh gods, at last,_ and felt the universe explode all down his spine.

**+7 days, six hours**

oh-six hundred. On other days at this time, he'd have met pilots keeping up their fitness by doing laps before breakfast; he'd done it himself, for many years. Now he walked, briskly but with no edge of haste - people don't like to see their CO rushing - winding his way through the uniform causeways and corridors that led to the port flight pod. Normally he could have called the people he had to see up to his office, but the pilots had been pushed harder and more dangerously for the past six nightmarish days than most of the rest of the crew, and two of them especially. He didn't want to call either of them up to the command deck, make them defensive, before he had a chance to find out what he needed to know.

As he turned off B-Causeway and took the short set of stairs, a group of pilots on their way to the mess crossed his path; they flipped short, startled salutes at him and relaxed when he returned them with a grin. "At ease people. CAG in his office?"

"No, sir," Frosty - one of his surviving squadron - answered, jerked his head back towards the sleeping quarters. "Still in officer's rack, sir. They got done with the rosters kinda late."

"Stimmed, too." Another added, a thin man the Commander didn't recognize. "Doubt he got much sleep, or Starbuck either."

Adama nodded, tried not to let his features change at the way the pilots considered his son and Thrace collectively. "Thanks. Go get some food into you, and be careful out there." He turned his back on the ragged chorus, followed the corridor further still.

The senior officer's racks were at the end of this particular hall, the slight privilege of having less traffic and more quiet past their hatch something that all of them came to value on a busy Battlestar. Come to think of it, the rack was nearly empty: one or two senior lieutenants and Thrace, from Aurora. One junior officer and Raptor pilot, Valerii, who doubled as the officer of the Deck, and Lee. None of his own senior lieutenants. They'd all died, with Jack Spencer, flying home. Quarters that were too quiet were as hard to accept as those with too much noise.

He couldn't ask, but he hoped that Lee was bearing it well enough. And as for Thrace...

It was hard to suppress his resentment, hard not to automatically dismiss her as a bitch and a liar, especially after years of turning the issue over and over in his head. She'd failed his son after Zak had left her, and the way Zak had looked on that vidscreen after the word came through: _betrayal writ large_, he remembered, and recognized the words were not his own. It wasn't easy to forget how broken up his son had been, how he'd ranted about lost chances and how much he'd screwed up by letting Kara close.

But he couldn't deny the words of his crew, either. He couldn't deny the pride in the ranks of pilots that lined up behind Starbuck, the way they acclaimed her when she wasn't in the room. He couldn't forget Lee's voice, his tone definite: "she's a good leader."

A commander couldn't afford to entertain doubts about his senior officers. He'd talk to her, pretend he'd never met her before today. See if the metal he could sense in her was true steel, or just brass. And he'd talk to Lee, see if he could find the line between family and command just enough so that neither was compromised.

The hatch to their bunk-room was swinging open towards him as he took the final steps; Valerii stepped out, and was closing it when he touched her on the shoulder. She froze, her gesture of salute halting when he shook his head, and then moved past him with a slightly nervous smile. Adama grinned, remembering feeling like that, and pulled the hatch back towards him as he turned towards the room - just in time to see Lee, his hair ruffled with sleep and his chest bare, tug Starbuck up out of her bunk by one arm and pull her close. They would have kissed, but he stepped in, let the hatch slip from his fingers and close with a heavy thud, every thought of dispassion and objectivity disappearing in a rush of rage.

Apollo's arm tightened around her as they both regarded him in shock. Adama flicked a glance at Lee, saw the anger building a lot like his own. "Get out," he snarled at his son, without looking. Lee shook his head, stepped in front of Thrace. "I gave you an order, Captain."

Lee looked at Kara, and something passed between them too swiftly to decipher, and it just added to Adamas's rage. Then his son dragged his tanks over his head, saluted sharply and was gone, leaving him alone with Kara Thrace.

**end ch4.**

Sorry about the delay on this one, started a new job this week and it's been hectic. I hope you're still enjoying! Would appreciate any feedback you're willing to give!


	5. Chapter 5

Title: **Eris and Aurora** (part 5 of 7)  
Characters: Lee / Kara. Adama.  
Rating: M  
Disclaimer: Not mine, yadda yadda. Used with respect and without intent to profit.

-0-0-

**-3 years, seven months**

Lee remembered the night they met, remembered how weirdly perfect the day had been before the significant moment arrived: some pretty girl whose name he barely remembered now, only two months later, had been his date, and they'd spent the gorgeous, crisp blue afternoon walking the lake shore and planning how they'd spend the proceeds of a lottery ticket. There'd been enough autumn in the air for the dusk to turn cool, so he'd slung his jacket around what's-her-name's shoulders. That's when his pager beeped, the number on the display one he didn't need prompting to recognize. Zak's, but with no interplanet code attached: he was home.

Summer leave from the Academy meant two regulation free weeks, and when Lee saw that number on the display, he knew precisely what it meant. Zak had managed to convince his free spirited new girlfriend to come to Caprica with him. When Lee'd last talked with his little brother, Zak hadn't thought it likely; and if she wouldn't come, then Zak wouldn't come either. He said that Kara - and while Lee still thought of her as 'the new girlfriend', he knew they'd been together half a year - was fleet, too; Lee thought that meant that the two of them were unlikely to get leave at the same time.

Later, of course, he discovered that it really meant that Kara wasn't comfortable with meeting her lover's family... or that her lover's family really wouldn't appreciate meeting her.

Still, the pleasant surprise was muted a little when he rang Zak, and found him at the bar downtown. It was a Fleet hangout, patronized substantially by the military, but not one of the better ones. This one had a name for backroom Triad games, for fights breaking out over same, for the MP's showing up at odd moments as though expecting trouble. It was certainly not the kind of bar an officer liked the idea of his wet-nosed cadet of a brother hanging out in. What's-her-name had been gracious about going home and letting him catch up with Zak, but Lee himself found it difficult to be gracious when he realized that the 'new' girlfriend was the blonde, smoulder-eyed player in the most serious of the back room games, chips piled haphazardly in front of her along with a tangle of credit notes.

Zak had waved him over, and Lee had felt his jaw tighten before they'd even hugged: Zak was half-drunk already, at just after sundown. But he'd held his tongue, and his little brother had chuckled into his ear while the players at the card table talked trash. "Kara's wiping the floor with 'em, bro. Give her another hour, and we'll be staying at the Andromeda for the next two weeks."

Mentioning the high-luxury (high price-tag) hotel hadn't mollified Lee, and as it turned out, Zak was wrong. After fifteen minutes, some major from somewhere-or-other threw down his cards when Kara won again and passed a very ill-advised remark about the last time he'd met Starbuck. Kara had paused in the act of sweeping up her winnings and countered with her own ill-advised comment on how surprisingly unmemorable the event must have been.

The major had gaped at her, then flipped the table over, Kara's winnings and drink and still smoking cigar showering herself and Zak and Lee. And then this new girlfriend of Zak's had delivered the best right hook he'd ever seen, from anyone, and the major had been history.

Zak, late to the party but helpful as ever, had grabbed her wrist to prevent an encore performance; Kara had reeled around, not half so affected by her alcohol consumption as she might have appeared, and on reflex clocked Zak on the point of the jaw.

Combined alcohol and violence k.o.'d Zak, but Kara caught him before he hit the floor, swearing audibly and creatively. "Gods, Zak," she'd said, Lee unfolding his arms and moving to help her even as the rest of the players in the game were trying to pick up tables and chairs and cash before the management showed, "you know better than to frakking grab me like that."

"And you should know better than to let him get drunk at this time of day. Zak's a lightweight." He'd said it with the instinctive disgust of someone who thinks the hearer has been willfully stupid, and was stunned to see the woman pale slightly before her eyes narrowed at him.

"Zak makes his own decisions," she snapped. "You must be his brother; he warned me that you were going steady with the colonial Code."

"He told me that _you_ were smart" Lee snapped back.

For a moment, they wavered on the knife's edge, her free hand clenched into a fist as they hauled Zak between them and out the back door just as the proprietor - and the MPs - came through the front. "Yeah, well, he's pretty often wrong," she said then and laughed. "Everybody has a skill."

Over the bent and limp form of his little brother, Lee had looked at Kara Thrace and seen in her precisely what he believed Zak had seen: the vitality and hunger for life, the frank physicality, the way humor turned her strong, attractive features into something that stole your breath. He knew, in that moment, why Zak had braved their father's disapproval of their affair: no matter what the rules might say on the issue - and they could say a lot - this woman wasn't willing to let duty keep her from someone she loved.

That moment in the alley, he'd begun to forget all the all-too-pretty girls, all too willing to take the arm of an Adama, too willing to share his bed or coo over his eyes, only too happy to be with him until someone better came along. He'd never met anyone like Kara Thrace before, and there, surrounded by dingy brick and open trash cans and supporting the weight of his unconscious sibling between them, not ten minutes since laying eyes on her for the very first time, Lee felt the thought go through his mind like hot wire through butter: he wished he'd met her first.

**+7 days, six hours, _Galactica_ senior pilots bunkroom, port flight pod**

The door had shut solidly behind Lee more than thirty seconds before he broke the silence; the tactic was an old one to put his opponent off balance, make her talk, but she was recalcitrant, mute. Begrudgingly, Adama obeyed protocol only so far as to address her first. "Captain Thrace."

"Commander?" She stood there, skivvies and skin and a scowl twisting the expressive mouth, her posture not precisely relaxed, but neither was she on edge.

"Don't you think you should at least be attempting to explain what I just saw?"

"With all due respect, sir" her voice stayed monotone, the only disrespect the way her eyes had no trouble meeting his, "you've never been interested in my explanations."

"For obvious reasons. Get dressed."

She lifted an eyebrow, then hooked a pair of duty pants out of a nearby locker and slid into them. Her tanks went over the athletic bra. He watched, coldly assessing: Thrace apparently wasn't a bit self-conscious, it seemed, not even of being mostly naked in front of her commanding officer. Bill Adama wondered if she had any shame at all, concluded as she stepped into a pair of ship-soles that it was unlikely. She didn't even glance at him again until she had buttoned the BDU shirt and belted it into place.

Then when she did meet his eyes, he noticed the rush of heat under the skin of her throat, and watched the expression of indifference slip through surprise into ire. "You used to be a pilot, sir. You should know better than to stare."

"And you should know better than to make use of your fellow officers, shouldn't you?" He narrowed his eyes, felt all the pain and grief and frustrated anger at this woman build up in his throat as he glared at her. "Least of all a superior officer who is the brother of the man you destroyed! Fraternization codes don't mean very much to you, do they, captain?"

Thrace's indignation vanished, her twisted mouth mocking him, her expression a semblance of pain that couldn't possibly be real. "Not in comparison to what your sons mean to me, Commander."

"Don't frak with me! Don't you dare imply that you cared about Zak, that you care about.."

"I'm not implying, I'm admitting. I love Zak. And as for Lee -"

"Shut your mouth" he heard himself snarl. "Don't you... Don't you _dare_ frakking discuss my sons with me."

She obeyed, but was not cowed, her eyes meeting his fearlessly. It made him angrier still. "Captain Thrace, I came down here this morning to talk to you, to find out... well. I found out. You can report to the brig, Thrace; charges of fraternization and conduct unbecoming. You'll be escorted to the flight deck for your shifts."

She saluted, her gesture sharp and practiced, and not the least bit insubordinate. "Yes, sir." As she spun the hatch open, he turned to watch her leave, and the door swung open to reveal his son waiting outside, leaning against the corridor paneling. Thrace looked at Lee, and then glanced back over her shoulder at Adama, lifting a hand to forestall the younger man's reaching towards her. "Should have been your sister, Lee," she said quietly, and shook her head. "Couldn't have frakked us up that way." Then she was gone.

Lee wasn't. "Sir?" The word had the usual distaste overlaying it, the same way he'd heard it for years from his elder son's mouth.

"That will be all, Captain."

The door clanged as Lee closed it behind him. "No, it won't, commander." The rank address was definitely not a term of respect. "What have you done now? Chosen to blame her for something else the Adamas did?"

"Captain Thrace is on report for fraternization." He stepped around his son, but Lee's laughter stopped him in his tracks, the sharp crack of sound that was anything but humorous.

"Then you'd better lock me up and make her the CAG, if you're suddenly so interested in playing by the rules, sir."

"What?"

"I'm her superior officer, after all. The offense in fraternization rests on the subject of higher rank."

"You're both captains."

"I've got seniority by three months, actually," Lee said, his face stony. "And you made me CAG."

"Technically she's the second in command of _Aurora_ -"

"In which case, she's _technically_ not my subordinate, and _technically_ I'm not her CO. And _technically_, fraternization doesn't apply."

Lee was glaring at him, and he was glaring back, the old patterns asserting themselves all too easily. "I'll be the judge of what does and doesn't apply on my ship, Captain." He shoved past Lee's shoulder, spun the hatch open with an angry hand.

Lee's abrupt exhalation was an echo of his earlier laugh. "You always did have to be right, didn't you?"

Adama turned, saw his son pulling BDU's over his tanks and shorts. "Stay away from her, Lee."

He had never realized just how much of himself was in his son until Lee turned and looked at him, buttoning his shirt calmly. "Is that an order ... sir?"

**+10 days, _Galactica_ flight deck, port landing pod.**

Rhys Marroll had made a career out of being in the right places at the right time; it was something he was known for. When he'd been a pilot, he'd been a decent one, not particularly brilliant but particularly lucky. It had almost been his call-sign, but one of his classmates had "Luckington" as a patronym and was therefore "Lucky" by default. Luckington had taken a post on the _Pegasus_; Rhys supposed whatever fortune came with that call-sign had worn off right about the time of the attacks.

Instead, Marroll had been anointed with the name of "Marker" by his classmates, mostly because he always seemed to be the one right on the mark. And despite having been at the helm of an _Archer_ and not a Viper for the past ten years, the talent evidently had not failed him: he was on the flight deck, just climbing out of his raptor, when two Marines escorted Starbuck to the flight deck and left her there. The expression on her face was unmistakable, and Colonel Marroll took an abrupt detour away from the lieutenant who'd come to escort him to sickbay.

Starbuck saw him coming, her face visibly tightening before she dredged up a smile and tossed him a jaunty salute. "Sir, what brings you back aboard this bucket of bolts?"

"The doc wants to poke more holes in me, I'd guess; thought it'd be a good time to see how the rest of our people are doing."

"Nova is going to make it," she said, her smile real as she looked up at him. "They took her off life-support last night."

"They let you out of the brig to see her?"

Starbuck's grin faded. "You heard about that?"

"No, but when I see you with an armed escort to the flight deck, and you're not geared up for combat yourself," he tugged the sleeve of her orange deckhand's coverall, "I figure you're back in a private room." He put a hand on her elbow, tilted his face enquiringly.

"No, sir; I haven't been out of the brig; heard the news from Alex on CAP." The same expression she'd been wearing when he first glimpsed her on the deck, that same hollow, hopeless one he'd seen her wear so often when she first joined Aurora's crew, was back full force. "The private room started to get old two days ago."

"You didn't hit Adama, did you?"

She huffed, and the hollowness ebbed behind a half-grin. "Nope."

"Are you going to tell me? Or do I have to ask the Commander?"

Starbuck paused, shook her head. "Not my place, sir."

_Ahh, Adama. But which one_? "You have a shift to work, then, and no doubt that old rogue Cottle has a syringe with my name on it. Carry on, Starbuck."

"Aye, sir. Give my best to Duck and Strife, and to Nova if she's awake?"

"You got it."

The watch officer - Gaeta? he looked like his old man - was waiting for him. "Commander's compliments, sir; he asked me to bring you these armament reports and let you know he'd like to see you when you're through in sickbay."

Rhys took the folder without looking at it. "Of course, Lieutenant. He's in CIC?" Gaeta's nod blurred in his forevision as he saw Captain Adama come in through the main hatch, his face stern and his glance raking the flight deck and stopping abruptly. Marroll took two steps further away, out of the direct flight path, and opened the folder as though fascinated with ordinance inventories. Galactica's CAG didn't even see him, moved straight past him on a heading to one Captain Kara Thrace. The flight deck was noisy, but -

"I'm sorr-"

"Frak's sake, Lee," he heard Starbuck's familiar, terse tones, "don't apologize."

"But -"

"Forget it. Mistakes happen."

"Who said anything about a mistake?" It sounded like Adama was snarling. "Only thing I'm sorry about is that this is the first time in days I've been able to talk to you. Plus, I'm a little sorry that the old man has such impeccable timing. If he'd been five minutes later, he'd _really_ have seen something to throw you in the brig over."

A moment's pause preceded a laugh, real laughter, Kara Thrace at her most honest, followed a heartbeat later by the CAG's throatier chuckle. "Might have been worth it," she added, her eyes glinting. "Look, Lee -"

Marrol missed the words, if they were spoken at all, in the shocking flood of sound that followed the unpleasant tremor in the deck beneath his feet. The screech of metal, muted, teamed with the thud-thud-thud of whatever force had made _Galactica_ tremble. And after that, in the suddenly silent deck, there was just the awful hiss of compartments venting into space.

"Oh gods," the stunned crew on the hangar deck heard their chief of watch say, "it's the water tanks."

It took less time for Adama to assert himself than Marker expected: the younger man had head-counts and an auxiliary CAP and a Raptor inspection crew moving almost by rote. Blood will out, Marroll supposed; some men, no matter how reluctant, are natural leaders. But it wasn't Apollo's leadership that he'd seen first, that his own gods-given talent had put him once again in the right place and right time to see: it was the way, in that brief, gut-wrenching moment of terror when the entire deck trembled, Lee Adama had reached for Kara Thrace. And Thrace had reached back.

Gaeta in tow, Colonel Marroll abandoned his visit to Sickbay and headed straight for the hatch and CIC; the deck crew were moving purposefully about him, no panic evident unless you looked in their eyes. If someone were to ask, he'd have to say that water might be a big problem - and a fatal one - but it wasn't the only one, or the one closest to the heart of _Galactica_.

**+21 days. Roslin's office, _Colonial One_**

"Madam President?"

'_Military personnel are somewhat more accustomed to water rationing. Still, what they do - especially the engineering and maintenance crews, and the flight wing - is hard physical work. They won't complain, but I'd imagine it won't help the mood much. Speaking for myself, a hot shower after combat - or a patrol - works wonders..._'

"Madam President?"

_'Captain Adama's injuries are not severe; still, he'll be off flight for a few days at least' ... 'The marine sniper didn't hit him, thankfully -' ... 'He got what he went for' ... 'he's your adviser.'_

"President Roslin?"

_'The strain's starting to tell, I think. I don't like to mention this - not to you, or the Commander - but you've asked me: honestly, the flight wing is doing it tough. Daily casualties, and now this gods-damned accident. Our numbers have steadily declined since Ragnar and... well, to put it bluntly, there's too few pilots to cover requirements for more than a week. Daily patrols work okay for a week or two, but after that, it starts to tell. And most of us have other work to do on top of CAP: maintenance, admin work for our squads, flight reports and assessments - plus, there are minimum fitness requirements, which means daily training on top of our other work, or we're useless in a cockpit. Madam President, there's not enough of the pilots to go around. And now this...'_

"Laura?"

"Billy?" President Roslin blinked once, focusing on the face of her aide, rather than on her recollections of her recent meetings with _Galactica_'s officers. Like her aide, her unofficial military adviser was a young man. Like Billy, Lee Adama looked tired more often than not these days. Unlike Billy, Captain Apollo's eyes frequently held something more than earnest intent to do his duty; Billy might display his concern for her, or his confusion about something, but Apollo... was angry. Deeply angry. Painfully angry. "I'm sorry, Billy; trying to think my way through some of the difficulties facing our military personnel."

"Of course. I didn't mean to interrupt -"

"I didn't mean to tune you out. What is it?"

"Well - it's about them: our military personnel. I was over on _Galactica_ this morning and..." The young man's cheeks flushed a little.

"... and you met Petty Officer Dualla for breakfast? How is she?"

"Fine. Er, she's fine, Madam President. A little tired. But she said something that I thought you should know... about the pilots."

It wasn't official - that much was obvious. Billy Keikeya wasn't completely ingenuous, but it was apparent that her aide held certain ideas about confidentiality. Still, if it bothered him enough to overlook those principles and come to her with it... "And you think I should know. Off the record?"

Billy relaxed. "Yes, exactly." He shuffled his usual stack of file folders a moment, then looked up at her. "The training program. It's causing some problems on _Galactica_ - some conflict between Captain Apollo and Commander Adama."

Even graceful, self-contained presidents could want to swear, and the impulse was suddenly overwhelming. She gave in, quietly, barely shaping the profanity with her lips: _frak_. Then Laura shot a piercing glance at her assistant: "Dee told you this?"

He hesitated. "Not in so many words." Laura narrowed her gaze, and Billy gave in. "She told me that being the Commander's unofficial secretary is dangerous right now. Someone's sure to bite her head off. And then she started to explain how she had to take the training intake lists down to the CAG last night, but she stopped, just shook her head."

_Frak_, she thought again, but didn't say it. Dualla's job was to man the ship's communications board, but that meant that she already handled most of the internal communications, one way or another, so serving as an assistant to a hideously overworked commander would be burden enough without adding further problems. But if the strain - easily detected, especially since the _Olympic Carrier_'s fate - between the Adama men had become fraught enough to spill over to intermediaries... Laura shook her head. "When is Captain Apollo due over next, Billy?"

"He's outside - that's the reason I came in. The rest ... well, it seemed like a good time to warn you."

"You're right, of course. And thank you. Please tell the Captain I need five minutes and then I'll be glad to see him." Billy nodded and left, and Laura Roslin turned back to gaze out the viewport nearest her desk, then lifted her desk 'phone. "Mark? yes" she told the pilot, "everything's fine. Can you patch me through to Colonel Marrol on the _Aurora_, please?"

**+24 days, 9 hours, ****_Galactica_ flight deck, port landing pod.**

Kara resisted the urge to wipe the sweat off her forehead, knowing that both hands were thick with engine grease; the last thing she wanted, given the fact that the new president was touring the flight deck and seemed to have an especial interest in her - orange jumpsuit, lack of flight insignia and rank pins, and unobtrusive but present marine escort notwithstanding - was to have to face down the woman's scrutiny feeling any more like a six-year-old with a muddy face. The President already had an aura of command that set Kara's teeth on edge, reminded her too much of _being_ that six-year-old. She felt her more reckless side compensating and bit her lip, wishing there was some way to damp down her automatic Starbuck. Letting the bad-ass pilot do the talking never got her anywhere.

Except the brig, she acknowledged ruefully as the President's eyes flickered from herself to the guard eight feet away (unarmed, but she doubted this civilian was ignorant that to most of the Colonial light attack infantrymen, firearms were just a bonus, at least, a bonus if the target was _human_) and then back to Kara. The woman gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod, thanked her for her time and walked on, trailing entourage.

The entourage included Lee, who didn't move on quite so quickly; chancing conversation here, with that asshole Tigh still in view, wasn't likely, but they'd become quite good at unspoken communication in the last three weeks. At least, Lee had. She didn't even need to see the way his mouth quirked ruefully to know that he was apologizing. Probably for the President's scrutiny, though what he thought she thought he could have done about it, only the Gods would have any idea.

Lee was always quick to shoulder blame he didn't deserve.

Then he was gone, too; following Keikeya and Dualla towards the far hatch, dutifully escorting the President of the Colonies on her impromptu tour of Galactica's combat flight facilities. Roslin's own marine escort and the unavoidable members of the press trailed after them. Kara waited until they'd all gone past the end of the Viper she was servicing and started to hunker down again, but a hand clamped around her upper arm before she could disappear under the undercarriage.

The response may have been involuntary - indeed, she knew it was going to happen and couldn't stop it, felt her muscles bunching the moment something came in contact with her flesh - and brought on for the most part by the association in her memory of authority-figures and fear of them, but she knew it was the wrong thing to do even while it was happening. Her fist, grease-laden, glanced off the man's cheekbone just as she realized who it was she was decking.

Tigh.

Maybe they'd court-martial her and kick her out, rather than just keep her in the brig for the term of her natural life?

"Frak, Thrace," the man said, his left hand going to his cheekbone while his right came up to forestall the interference of her marine escort. "I know that woman makes me want to hit things, but this is ridiculous."

"Next time, sir," she bit off, surprised at the mild response and her hackles raising because of it, "don't grab me."

"Or throw card-tables at you?" Tigh scowled, reached out and snagged a cleaner-than-average looking cloth from the maintenance trolley and used it to brush at his blackened (but it was grease, she hadn't hit him that well) cheek.

Kara stared, and then started to get angry: somebody had been telling Adama family stories to this man and she could guess who. Lee wouldn't have told Tigh the time of day without orders, given a choice; like most of the pilots, his respect for the Galactica's XO had diminished in exact proportion to the amount of liquor on the Colonel's breath during a shift, rank pips notwithstanding. Which meant that Lee's father - _Zak's father_, she thought and repressed the instinctive wince - had found that out, and shared it. "No, sir," she agreed eventually. "Not that, either."

"It's a good thing you're already in the brig, or I'd have to press charges. If you want to hit me, Thrace, don't do it in front of witnesses. You're just lucky that you missed." Kara started; there was a slightly red patch on his cheekbone, mostly obscured by ill-wiped engine oil, but she hadn't missed. Was he drunk?

Tigh stared at her, made a gesture towards the busy hangar deck: not one person was watching, the Viper that had been her current punishment having screened them from all but her watchdog's view. Tigh quirked an eyebrow at the marine, who relaxed and nodded. "You're right, I shouldn't have grabbed you. And as neither of us, as of ten minutes ago, are on duty, I'll... pretend it didn't happen."

The enemy-ally-enemy act was making her head spin. Sympathy and blame and camaraderie and... frak. Was he drunk? The clarity of his gaze and the way it hardened under her scrutiny assured her that he wasn't, this time.

"But I won't forget, Captain." The momentary friendliness vanished, the Colonel's expression going sour again, "Go get cleaned up. Commander Adama wants to see you."

That was as likely as - three weeks ago - the thought of another Cylon war. She doubted Commander William Adama wanted to see anything but the sight of her getting blown out an airlock; however, orders were orders. And there was that weird thing with the President...

It wasn't making sense, but as she straightened the front of her dress blues - the first time she'd been so formal since being sent to the brig, weeks before - and rapped on the hatch to Commander Adama's quarters, she swallowed the confusion, letting other feelings come into play. He said 'come' from somewhere inside, so Kara went in; despite his eyes being evidently engrossed in the stack of reports before him, he waved a hand to have her close the door. "Captain."

"Sir," she answered, trying not to give rein to the angry insolence she always felt around this man.

"My X.O. and your colonel have been requesting I deal with your situation, Thrace. Now it seems our President has interested herself on your behalf. What do you know about that?"

"Excuse me, sir?" she was still baffled, but that was something she at least knew herself to be blameless of. She also noticed that the Commander did _not_ mention his CAG.

"President Roslin has evidently been reviewing personnel files; she came aboard today on regular business and then asked me why I was burdening my already overworked CAG with the duties of training new pilots when I had a fully qualified -" and here Adama's voice almost quivered with sarcasm, "- and highly recommended Pilot-Instructor aboard."

Kara's instinctive response would have been to inform him that the same officer who'd selected her had been a man even more highly decorated as a pilot in the first war than the one she was confronting, but it wasn't necessary to say so. It was in that same file. Instead, she spoke from feeling, not from pride. "Lee would make a great instructor. But he has more than enough to do."

"Captain Adama", and the Commander stressed the rank, the surname, as though she could have forgotten either, "is off flight duty until he recovers from the injuries he received aboard_ Astral Queen_. He is not so stretched as either you or the President seem to believe."

"I don't know what to believe, sir. I've been in the brig for seventeen days." _But,_ she didn't add, _Lee still has more than enough to do_.

"And I have yet to formalize charges against you," he finished, apparently mistaking her accusing note. "Another thing that none of my senior officers has failed to notice." For the first time, he looked up from his paperwork, his eyes so grey-blue and cold in his worn face that she found it momentarily hard to believe this man had fathered either of the men she cared so much about. "Do you know why I have not?"

It was hard to be just Starbuck with Adamas, but the glare sparked her defenses. Kara gambled: it was something she was good at. "If you're like your sons at all, sir, it's because you know the charges you initially handed me were not fair."

Commander Adama's stare went from glacial to blazing, it almost - _almost_ - rocked her back on her heels. And then it was gone again, the mask of inscrutable command slipping into place over it. "You're correct, of course. Technically, Captain Adama would have been the one to face charges on an instance of fraternization. But if the charges were not 'fair' as you call it, they were, however, justified, which is why you have remained in the brig."

Kara shrugged. She didn't want Lee charged on her account, and if a few weeks bunking behind bars kept that possibility to a minimum, she'd take it.

"Unfortunately," Adama went on, looking back down at the paperwork stacked before him, "I no longer have the luxury of keeping you there. As the president has so kindly pointed out to me, we need pilots. And while discipline might be better maintained by having you confined, I cannot compromise the training program by having the nuggets under orders to an officer whose status is compromised."

"You're releasing me?"

"You will return to senior officer's quarters. Your record will show three weeks incarceration on the basis of administrative punishment for conduct unbecoming while in a state of war, with no charges laid. You retain your rank and flight privileges, and you remain the deputy CAG. You will hold the auxiliary rank of 'Instructor', and you will train my new pilots to the best of your ability. However..." Commander Adama stood in his place, meeting her eyes, and Kara realized that, if anything, the still undefined feeling between herself and Lee had done nothing to temper the older man's hatred of her. Rather the opposite. And worse still, it had extended his dislike to somewhat include his son.

Before this all happened, Lee had despised his father, blaming him for Zak's death, for her own misfortunes, but Kara had known that William Adama had not felt the same for his son. Now, though...

"However," the Commander was saying, "I will tolerate no further breaches of military discipline from you, or Captain Adama. At the very least, I expect you to remember that he is Zak's brother. If you felt _anything_ for my son," and there was the almost-crack in the voice again, this time with genuine feeling rather than irony, "I hope you will have more respect for his memory than to continue to betray it."

She was dismissed; Kara let herself out and was halfway back down the ship before the sudden, hopeless empathy she felt for him in that moment wore off. But it did wear off, abruptly, only to be replaced by the knowledge that she was now even more of a barrier between Zak's father and Zak's brother than she'd ever been before.

-0-0-

Your feedback and comments would be very much appreciated. Thank you! I hope you're enjoying the read.


	6. Chapter 6

**Title**:** Eris and Aurora, 6/7**   
**Rating**: M. Sex references, language, violence.  
**Characters**: Kara/Lee, Adama.

**Disclaimer**: Don't own it. Just love it.

-0-0-

**-4 months. Commander's Quarters, _Galactica_, on station off Caprica**.

Commander William Adama threw the dispatches down and looked down at the photograph on his desk one more time: Zak, in his first dress grays, stoic for the camera, but his eyes smiling, grin just peeking through. Adama's teeth ached with the force of his clenched jaw, and he felt his short, blunt nails digging into the palm of the other hand. "I'm sorry, son," he told the picture, told the boy whose existence now was restricted to images like these and a bitterly scant handful of memories. Most were good memories, the golden recollections of his baby son, the dark laughing eyes looking up at him from the swing or the bicycle. But the good memories were overshadowed when one could not overlook how quickly that smile had left the world.

Zak had always wanted to fly. It had started, he remembered, on the very swings he recalled with such clarity: four-year-old Zak, his arms recklessly flung wide as the swing climbed higher and higher. "Faster!" he'd called. "I want to fly like a Viper, Daddy!"

It hit him to the heart, even then: the boy was so truly his son. Flying had galvanized the young Bill Adama, had turned him from a well-intentioned but confused recruit in a long and terrifying conflict into a warrior with a purpose. It took his talents and honed them. He'd loved it like nothing else, and nothing had ever quite displaced it until his sons were born. He'd seen the same love spark in Lee, but Lee didn't reach out, like his little brother did. He didn't share his joy in the idea of it, at least not with him. Lee was already following his own road, even then.

So it was Zak he played with on his infrequent shore leave visits, Zak he took to the Base with him, a proper little soldier in imitation khakis, his sharp and often-practiced salute charming all the pilots and officers. Lee, tagging along when Zak begged him to, wore jeans and shirts - neat but out-of-place - would watch everything and say nothing, seeming much older than his years and looking much younger, but Zak would exclaim and ask questions and demand to sit in the pilot's seat.

When Lee finished school and went to university, it hadn't been a surprise. A disappointment, perhaps, but not a surprise: he'd hoped both sons would follow in his footsteps and serve the Colonies. Of Zak he had no doubts. The surprises had come later. His older son completed his studies in history, military history, ethics and philosophy with honors and then joined the Fleet as a reserve officer. Lee was placed in the pilot program fast enough to gratify even his old man. And Zak? Charming, charismatic, outgoing and desperate to fly, Zak applied straight out of basic training. And was rejected.

Unjustly, Bill Adama told himself, just like he had at the time. Husker had made few friends among the admiralty, over the years; he was too attached to his own methods, and it wouldn't have been the first time a kid was turned down as a backhanded insult to his family. It was the very existence of such politicking that had made Adama so determined to go his own way. The injustice was clear: Zak had had the knowledge; he had the brain for it. He even had the instincts; how could he not, when he got a civilian pilot's license at just seventeen, with brilliant scores on his theoreticals? How could anyone say he didn't have the physical capability to fly?

He'd made it happen for his son - the merest request in the right ear, the old friend who now wore Admiral's pins and couldn't stand the brown-nosing and back-stabbing that was so much a part of Fleet Command: he passed the written evals, surely he deserves a shot? - and he'd never regretted that. Not even later, when his son was killed. No matter what, Zak had wanted to fly, had been determined to fly, and Bill Adama, remembering the way Zak's face had lit up at the news, couldn't wish those strings unpulled.

It had been natural, after that, to keep tabs on Zak's progress, make sure he wasn't suffering anything else due to his old man's stubbornness. He'd been so proud when the kid's theoretical grades came back so high, even if his flight and tactical evals were much less stellar: Zak was one up on Husker there, because the science had never been Bill's strong point. The rest would come in time, he was sure.

He'd made a surprise visit to Picon the summer of Zak's second year in Flight, and glimpsed Zak leaving the post with a woman, an athletic blonde in a uniform that had officer's bars. It worried him, because with just over a year to go in Flight, he should be too busy for anything like that, let alone a relationship that was potentially a fraternization problem. But he'd let it go: after all, Zak was his son. It was almost to be expected.

Gossip sometimes floated back to him in _Galactica_'s remote posting: Lee won his entry to War College by writing a thesis debunking his Strategy instructor's favorite theories. Lee won his entry to War College by kicking his Flight Instructor's ass in the sims. Lee won his entry to War College by being brave enough to ask his CO's permission before trying to date his daughter. Bill had shrugged over all three options: Lee had never talked to him about any of it.

Zak on the other hand, was involved - and it seemed serious - with his own flight instructor, and Adama hadn't liked that at all. His suggestions that Zak cool it off, at least until after he graduated, and it got him a taste of the sharp end of Zak's generally easy temper. There had been a chill in Zak's eyes that day that not even the sweltering heat could mitigate. His own son, that charming, affectionate kid, had looked his old man in the eye and told him "I need her" - and it hadn't been with the hot passion of a lover defending his love, but with cold certainty. It had shocked Adama to see that at first, but the more he thought about it, the more it seemed just the kind of reaction a man - an Adama, that was - deeply in love would give.

Bill tried to understand, and he sympathized. But he'd been right, after all: Zak had paid for it. She'd been in charge of his final flight evals. When he failed that eval, Zak called him, the panic in his voice obvious even over the intervening immensity of space, and Bill had flown to Picon to find him. There he was, pacing up and down his tiny dorm room, utterly furious and utterly confused by turns. "How could she do this to me?" he'd asked. "Why?"

Bill Adama didn't know what had happened between his son and this Kara Thrace, but that didn't matter. The switch from affection to indifference could happen in no time at all, so the relationship should have been irrelevant. Everyone should understand that: these things happen. But Zak had said she shouldn't have failed him, and he believed his son. Zak had said it was over between them, and that had been all the motive needed, in Bill's mind.

So he made it happen for his boy. He'd made sure his son had a fair shake, and when the second examiner passed him - just barely, but passed him - that was proof. But Zak hadn't bounced back quickly, despite getting his wings. For the first time, in that tiny, messy bunkroom, he'd seen doubt in those eyes, those bright laughing brown eyes. Bill saw a fear that had never been there, never once, no matter how high the swing flew, or how much skin he lost when he tumbled off the bike.

"It wasn't supposed to happen this way," Zak had told him. It had repeated over and over in his mind when he stood next to Zak's coffin. It echoed in his head still, and always would until he found some kind of justice.

And here, on his desk, was the result of his final throw of the dice: every bit of influence he could muster, every favor he could call in, and the woman who'd planted the doubt in Zak's eyes was being promoted when he hoped he'd see her mustered out, released, sent to fly shuttle detail on some remote rock. Oh, she d been drummed out of Sparta, though not with open dishonor, and he'd had a hand in that; sent to a post that was supposed to get her forgotten, but now she was being promoted. Captain Kara Thrace. And nobody would help him anymore, not with this. Not when every C.O the woman ever had seemed to find her so godsdamned wonderful.

Commander William Adama screwed the terse dispatch into a ball, swept it off the desk onto the floor, and poured himself a glass of whiskey to soothe the bitter taste on his tongue. Captain Kara Thrace was Starbuck, Lead Pilot of the _Archer_-class scout ship _Aurora_, and his son was ashes in space and a name on a stone planted over an empty coffin.

"I'm sorry," he repeated. In the photograph, Zak's grin didn't waver, but then, it was only a photograph.

**+1 month, two days. Pilot officer's wardroom, _Galactica_**

"All of them? You washed all of them out?" Captain Adama's tone was incredulous. "We need them on deck. We needed them on deck yesterday."

"They're not viper pilots."

Kara spun the empty tumbler in a slow circle on the table, watching the harsh overhead light split into rainbows on the metal surface, the last precious drops of water drying on the inside of the lip. Her mouth felt just as dry, and she could feel the way her tanks clung unpleasantly, circled in sweat at the chest and under her arms. Showers were cut off, obviously, and there were lines of sticky heat in every crease of her body; she felt grimy with it. Dirty.

She felt even more so when she looked up at Lee, across the table. In his dress blues, straight from a watch in CIC, he looked crisp and cool, and far too perfect to want someone like her. Not that she could be sure that he did, not right now: his eyes looked hard, and his mouth had a stern crease that - she'd never dream of telling him - made him look just like his old man. Unlike his old man, though, he was purely professional, had been ever since they let her out of hack eight days before. She should have expected it, of course, but that didn t ease the sting. Eight days, and he d barely said a word to her. But here he stood, CAG to her Instructor, as though twenty-eight days ago, he hadn t looked at her like she was Aphrodite herself.

"Not yet they're not," he agreed, stressing the yet. "Give them a chance, Starbuck."

"They had it already," she negated. "Look, Captain, I've trained recruits into pilots. It's what I did, for years. I can tell when they've got the chops, and when they haven't. Some of these, if we had time to train them, simulators to train them on ... maybe they'd make the cut. But you Adamas are telling me to read them the basic flight manual and then expect them to go out there and put their asses between the toasters and the fleet, ASAP, and all that'll happen is they'll get dead. I won't do it."

Through the tirade, she'd heard the shrill note in her own voice, the rising edge of something other than professional assessment, and cursed under her breath. She sent the empty water-glass spinning away, the erratic orbit carrying it off the edge of the table. Lee's hand flashed out and caught it, and the lack of smash, of some small cathartic destruction, pissed her off. She should have expected this, should have expected all of it. "Frakking bastard," she snarled, loud enough for him to hear.

The insult didn't make a dent: not angry enough. Or perhaps he just knew her just well enough. "Kara -"

"Sir?" she responded, icily, knowing it was already too late.

"Zak dying... that wasn't your fault."

She jerked in her seat, got up so sharply that the metal legs of her chair screeched against the deck plating. Whirling so that her back was to him made the damp tendrils of her hair stick to her face, and it felt like the aftermath of sex, or tears. "Don't, Lee."

"Don't, what? Tell the truth?"

"It's not all the truth. And anyway, you really think it'll matter what the frakking truth is?

He made a small sound, like the start of a counterargument, and she turned again, cutting him off with a raised palm and more words and a glare that felt like it burned her eyes to give it. You think I don't know that if I sign off on their V-2's and let them fly, every time one of them comes back in a bag, or not at all, your old man will say it's my fault, that I didn't do my job?"

Lee's mouth opened, ready to speak, as though there was anything to say to that, then shut again in a thin, frustrated line.

"And if I don't pass them, Lee, what then?" She stalked across the room, reached for the coffee-pot, even though it wouldn't really help her thirsty throat. "Think it'll be any better? It won't. Then I'll be blamed for current pilots being overworked and tired, or for their deaths when they're flying a double CAP after too many double CAPs. Or he'll decide I'm doing it out of spite, or because I had grudges against the nuggets, or against you for breaking it off with me, or against him for any one of a million frakking reasons. Or maybe he'll decide I'm screwing one of them and am too selfish to pass him. It doesn't matter, does it? No matter what the reason is, it'll still be me who's wrong."

By the time she quit talking, her voice was scratchy with something more than dehydration, but the coffee pot was near empty, down to the last thick, bitter dregs. She set it down, heard Lee slide his own chair back and come towards her. His hand was heavy on her shoulder, but he just turned her around to face him. "I haven't broken anything off with you," he said quietly, looking right in her eyes, a stare as sharp as a searchlight, and as blinding. It felt as though it cut right through her. "And I don't give a frak what he thinks, Kara. Neither should you."

If only it were that simple! "His godsdamned battlestar, Apollo - he's the Commander. Not caring what he thinks might work for you, but -" His grip flexed on her arm, and then he let her loose altogether, started to turn away. Kara's chaotic emotions took on the abrupt overtone of guilt, and she reached for him. "Gods, Lee, just... damned if I do, damned if I don't."

He stopped, and the set of his shoulders relaxed. "Then all you can do is what you think is right, by both sides."

"I can't send them out there, Lee. Not yet. They need more time. They all need more time." She stared at the clean, graceful lines of his profile, feeling the silence stretch out while he neither turned nor spoke. _I need more time_.

"Then you've got it."

It was so abrupt it made her head spin - or was that the dehydration? Who knew? Both, maybe? "What?"

"I'm the CAG. I say who is - or isn't a pilot on my flight deck. And just in case someone wants to argue with me about it, we're going to go over these flight evals and you're going to give me a detailed run down. And then we'll both be doing our jobs - exactly as ordered - and that's all there is to say about it."

"In a perfect universe," she retorted, trying to be bitter. It was harder, with him this close.

"We don't have that," he agreed, and brushed the sticky ends of her hair off her forehead, let his hand slide down to cup the nape of her neck. "But I've got your back in this one."

The room was too public, the ship too busy for what she thought he was about to do. But he just leaned his forehead against hers, so close. "Yeah?"

"Always." He licked his lips, which left her a little cross-eyed and feeling more warmth against her sticky clothes, and took a deep breath. "I meant what I said, Kara: this isn't over. We're going to go to the mess and get you something to eat and a water ration, and we're going to go over these files. And then I'm going to take you somewhere quiet and prove it to you."

**+1 month, six days; 0915hrs. Pilots Ready Room, _Galactica_**

The way the flight suit pulled, slick and stubborn, like an ill-fitting but heavy skin, just added to the nerves. But the way that the pilots, in their varied duties and uniforms and suits just like the one she had struggled into, walked around the knot of jittery trainees without paying them the slightest heed? That pissed her off. Louanne Katraine hated to be ignored, or kept waiting.

Especially seeing the one pilot they were waiting for was fifteen minutes late for this check-flight; especially seeing the one pilot in question was Capt. Kara Thrace, or _God_, as she'd insisted the recruits address her. And fifteen minutes of shifting foot-to-foot in terrified anticipation, wearing the flight suit, the new helmet clutched protectively under an arm, was sending her adrenaline levels on a mad wave.

"Where the frak is Starbuck?" It wasn't the first time she'd asked, but it was certainly the loudest. If she'd been less nerve-wracked, she probably would have been more circumspect, but tyro or no, Louanne had never really been much good at minding her manners. And that query, however sharply put, at least managed to get a reaction from one of the officers in the ready room: the tall, lanky one that her instructor had laughingly called 'Tubby'.

He looked up, as did a half-dozen other pilots, some of whom paused momentarily in their activities and glanced towards her, but rather than giving her the usual stare, like a parent who objected to the noisiness of someone else's kid, Tubby dropped his clipboard and got up.

"_Captain_ _Thrace_," he said, with emphasis, "is a combat pilot and officer of this battlestar. If she finds it necessary to take care of other matters before she gets around to you," and his intonation made it perfectly clear that he was addressing persons of lower priority than a pilot's shoe-shine, sleep and social activities, "that's her decision."

Louanne bridled at that: these jet-jockeys couldn't afford to dismiss other pilots, even future pilots, so casually. But before she could point that out, Tubby had flicked his eyes over her squad mates and back to her, and forestalled her with some information of his own.

"Capt. Thrace has a full set of responsibilities as well as training. While you were all sleeping in your little bunks at oh-five-hundred, she was already flying CAP. I suggest you keep it in mind that Viper pilots don't always get to live by nice, neat little predictable schedules, and that Cylons certainly don't care if they interrupt your sack time. So sit down, read your pre-flight checklists over, and remember that the same person who's holding you up right now is the same one who's saved this fleet - that means your personal, protected little asses - a dozen times so far."

There as a few breaths of silence before she heard Costanza's muttered 'yes, sir!' and tacked her own reluctantly on the end of it.

It wasn't as though she'd forgotten, not really, Louanne told herself, because it was a pretty impossible thing to forget. Captain Thrace walked the decks of _Galactica_ in a kind of bubble, like the aura around her was palpable. The pilots were of one worshipful opinion of her on the flight-deck or in the fight, and whether they loved or hated her on the deck, they found in Starbuck something like a figurehead. Captain Adama was the boss, and his word was law when he found it necessary to give an order, but Starbuck was the High Priestess of Vipers. Where she led, they followed, or tried to. And Flight Lieutenant Alex Wayre had just made it crystal clear that nobody without a Viper's insignia on their breast was going to criticize their top gun.

The thought sent a shiver of a different excitement through the trainee; less physical, less palpable, more envious: what it must be like, to have that respect from everyone around you! To be the undisputed pack-leader, to have people who might want to break your jaw in the bunk-room back you up on the deck? That would be worth anything, Katraine decided. That would be worth having the prissy pressed-and-ironed CIC officers, the ones whose war didn't require them to break a sweat, sniff when they went past you, would be worth the chewing-out the Chief of the Deck might give you for combat damage or rough landings. It would even be worth this training crap, as though she needed it; she'd do it, just to prove herself. She was a good pilot, and she knew it, and she'd make these other pilots know it too. And one day, these people would look at Louanne Katraine like they looked at Kara Thrace.

There was a stir at the hatch and Louanne blinked back dreams of being the best in the fleet to see what it was. A royal entrance, though Capt. Thrace didn't look like _queen of the deck_ just now, and while the full-fledged pilots of _Galactica_ all acknowledged her with wisecracks and greetings and grins, there were a few worried looks in the worship. A few creased frowns, a few exchanges of silent questions between members of the pack. Katraine thought that Thrace looked tired, not relishing the adoration at all; she didn't even seem to notice it.

Three steps behind her, the CAG came in, which had everyone scrambling to their feet, including the trainees, who clumsily followed HotDog's lead. Apollo waved them down, his gaze firmly glued to the back of Starbuck's head. He nodded at the sharp salutes (and the sloppier ones of the recruits) and his 'at ease, people' was obeyed, but almost every eye in the room stayed on him. And on Starbuck.

The two of them huddled, almost, for a second by the duty board, and the CAG said something too low to hear, before disappearing out the forward hatch. And Thrace pinched the bridge of her nose, took a deep breath, and then something happened. In her, or to her, Katraine couldn't quite figure it, but all of a sudden, there she was: the Pilot everyone wanted to be. Her eyes crackled fire. Her grin was wide and vicious. The tired, worried woman vanished, leaving a goddess in her place.

She turned the divine smile on her trainees, and Katraine felt her nerves flutter once again. "Well, children, time to test out your sphincter control. Get your asses to the flight deck, and apologize to the Chief of the Deck for being late. Go."

Indignant, Louanne grabbed for her pre-flight and followed Costanza and the others out the hatch, but in her fury at the sheer cheek of Starbuck, she was slower. Slow enough to hear one of the pilots ask 'God' how she was holding up. And to know that Captain Thrace didn't answer.

**+One month, six days; 0930hr, Commander's Quarters, _Galactica_**.

The words were cold - it wasn't a screaming match, at least not yet - but there was no mistaking the venom behind them. Lee didn't care. He was right, and knew he was right, but nothing he said ever made a frak's worth of difference. His pilots were still flying double shifts, and the recruits were still spending most of their time in the classroom, or on the flight deck learning about Vipers by working on the broken pieces of downed birds, but the alternative wasn't acceptable. No matter what his old man might want to think.

The discussion had scalpel-sliced back and forth for ten minutes already, short, sharp words. The commander had gone through every eval with a magnifying glass, looking for inconsistencies. He hadn't found them; his target wasn't the recruits anyway. That was becoming brutally obvious.

"Apparently the instruction periods they're getting aren't sufficient."

"If Captain Thrace wasn't flying twice as many patrols as the rest of the squadron, they'd have more."

"She's a senior pilot. It's her responsibility."

"Then it's going to take longer to train the nuggets, sir. I'd like approval to remove her from the roster in all but emergency capacity for the time being; that would speed things along."

"And leave a squadron of already overstretched pilots even more burdened. Request denied."

Lee held his tongue. It took effort.

"Where is Thrace right now? At the card table? On her ass in her rack?"

"Captain Thrace," he answered, succinctly, "is on the flight deck. The next training flight s due out any minute. She was there most of the night, too, helping with maintenance. You insisted on early check flights, which has added four birds to the repair schedule.

"Doesn't say much for her teaching, does it? Can't say I m surprised."

Lee's cool vanished, the remove he'd managed to hold onto evaporating, the contempt he'd been fighting to hide spilling out, like the old ship's water tanks, spilling ice into space. "And maybe if you didn't put so many frakking demands on her, they could wind up being good pilots. You've got her so buried in duty she barely has time to breathe. Teach. Fly patrols. Fly combat. Oversee repairs. Paperwork. Duty watch on the flight pod. I know you tried to get her dishonored out of the fleet before, but now it seems like you're trying to get her killed. You think that'll get your pilots trained, _dad_?"

The files, so far an anchor on his temper, the thing he'd been letting his hands get white-knuckled around in order to stop just this fight from starting: he slung them down on the desk in front of his father and let loose. "Starbuck spends less than four hours a cycle in her rack. Less than an hour in the wardroom, mostly in order to eat. She flies a morning patrol and an evening double, and in between she teaches those stupid frakking kids the basics - the very frakking basics! - of driving a Viper. Half of them puked their guts after their check-ride. None of them made the trap. Three of them had to get walked through their pre-flight, one didn't even check his own air seals, and one went into hysterics when they wheeled his bird into the tubes. It takes months to teach basic flight, and you know it, but you expect Kara to -"

The torrent was cut off, not by an officer's reprimand, not by a Commander's order, but by a bitter, angry man's disgust: "_Kara_. Still Kara, to you, always. Thought I raised you better than to make your decisions in your pants, Lee. Forget what she's done, how she destroyed your brother. Forget that she broke him and ruined his confidence. Forget how she got away with it, with sleeping with a kid, one of her own students, and frakking up his chances, how she never was made to answer for any of it. Forget the death of your brother, what it did to your mother, to me - as long as Kara-"

"That'd be the answer you'd pick, wouldn't it? Blame everything on my relationship with her, blame everything on her relationship with Zak. Zak made that relationship happen, Dad. Zak pursued her. Zak seduced her. He already knew who she was, and that she'd be teaching him in Viper school, you know. He knew precisely what he was doing. He expected her to pass him, and when she didn't, he dumped her. Who was using whom, do you think? My perfect little brother, who broke her heart because she wouldn't -"

Lee realized he'd said too much, just a moment too late. But Adama's expression showed he'd heard it, and rejected it, every word. "She shouldn't have failed him!"

"He should have failed!"

"You can't be sure of that."

"Can't I? It wasn't the first time, after all. He failed his entry-level check ride too, remember? He would never had made it into the Viper program without you, would he, Dad? I've seen the scores, and so have you. I requested the paperwork, and I know what it means: that even if you average out every flight test he ever took, he was still under that line. He would never have got his wings, if you hadn't gotten them for him. Kara -"

Adama's arms swept the pile of papers off, onto the floor; swept away his water carafe, his empty glass, the model ship he'd been building for years piece by painstaking piece. "Godsdamn Kara Thrace. Who is this woman? Discord herself? She's destroyed my family piece by piece! She's a cancer, more insidious than the frakking Cylons. First Zak, then you, and now my pilots, all somehow ended up in her careless, destructive hands, and I can't stop it. But I ll tell you this much, Captain: she'll do her job, and do it how I want it done, or I'll break her as thoroughly as she broke my son."

"You already did that, Sir. And when you demand I send out new pilots, before they're ready, you'll break them too. And when you blame Starbuck for that, you'll break the rest of us, every pilot who sees her working herself into the deck to keep up with your commands." Lee bent, gathered up the sopping file-folders, straightening the spilled and shuffled pages. The model ship had cracked on the floor, masts loosened, railing snapped. The tiller and helm had come completely adrift; he picked that up, too, and put it back on the table.

"You broke your ship, sir," he pointed out, and left without being dismissed.

**+one month, six days; 1000hr training shift, in flight outside the _Galactica'_s CAP radius.**

At least launch had gone smoothly on this round of training flights; Starbuck checked that she had CIC approval for the projected flight plan, took _dradis_ and by-eye confirmation of clear space, and sent their little preschool party off. Simple maneuvers and simple formations; introduction to astral bodies and the effect they could have on space flight. As long as the Cylons gave them a little break, she didn't think there'd be any problems.

She hoped. After all, she had enough of those waiting for her back on the deck. Two problems were labeled _Adama_ and one of those had been the reason she was relieved instead of apprehensive to be taking this little mother-hen flight. At least it got her off the deck, and away from further communications for a while.

She barked a drill question into the flight com, let the nuggets bounce possible answers back and forth, and tried not to think about Commander Adama, but it was impossible: how in the name of Hades was she supposed to interpret a meeting where he hadn't snarled or scowled at her, where he hadn't berated or belittled her, where he hadn't even mentioned Lee or the trainees or any current bone of contention. He'd found her on the flight deck, about to slip into her own Viper after buckling her nuggets into their birds. He had just stood there, four feet away and looked at her, apparently without expression, and asked one solitary question. Caught off guard by the calmness, the seeming lack of anger, she'd answered honestly.

His eyes had stayed locked on her, and then he'd nodded, just once. Then he'd spun on a heel and walked away. "Get back to work, Captain," he'd said, and the tone was familiar this time. Anger and emotion and retribution, but without his snarl fixed on her, it didn't hit her quite so hard.

She shook off the memory, checked formation, corrected the discussion. How often now had she done this? How many young pilots had she shepherded through their first flights? Too many, but she couldn't afford to let the process happen on autopilot. Distractions got pilots killed, and she'd be damned if she was going to lose one of these kids before Lee pinned on their pilot's wings. After? Well, she would do her best to stop that happening, too, but it didn't pay to think that far ahead.

Lee wouldn't think so. Lee never let the opportunity go past to plan for the future. He had ideas about futures, he always had, but she'd kind of figured that should have stopped at the end of the worlds, but they hadn't. He was still daydreaming, and not just for himself. She was part of any future he contemplated.

Kara thought Lee was insane anyway, for that alone, but to be making any kind of plan for anything beyond the next patrol, the next fight, the next gut-wrenching FTL leap through space: that sometimes seemed the maddest thing she'd ever heard. Easiest to live in the moment, to get yourself and the people who depended on you through the hour you were in before you worried about the next. And yet, sometimes, it seemed like these _somedays_ were the only thing they had that made it worth going through this hell.

"All right, children," she broke into the mild smack-talk, "enough mouth. Let's ease up to yellow acceleration, and take a ten degree arc to port. We're going to see how you handle pull from that planet. _Galactica_, this is Starbuck: we're proceeding to the second part of flight plan trainer-2, acknowledge?"

The command frequency crackled slightly, which made her frown; they must be on the edge of radio range. Then there was Lee's voice. "Go ahead, Starbuck. How're we holding up?"

"Oh, we'll survive, Apollo. Gonna take a little ring-around-the-moon, here, see how they like it. Starbuck out."

Damn Lee. How did he make even the simplest inquiry sound to her like a personal question? It _was_ personal, of course, with overtones of guilty conscience. Which explained the question Commander Adama asked, and why he'd suddenly become curious. Damn Lee and his big mouth. He kept getting himself mixed up in this whole sick story, and she damned herself as well for letting him. He'd already lost his brother. Alienating his old man wasn't going to fix that. She didn't want to like Bill Adama, but in between the war-stories, tall tales and family squabbles, she remembered that Zak had adored him.

Lee must have felt like that sometime, right? There must have been something

Mind back in the game, Starbuck. All right, nuggets. Stay in formation on my tail, I want you all to set your sticks and deviate as little as possible. Keep your distance from your wingman, and enjoy. This is quite a rush."

And it was. It was great, hearing Chuckles murmur _please gods, please_ in what he thought was a whisper and might have been except for the mic at his throat. It was great to hear Katraine's hoot of enjoyment. She wasn't even surprised when Costanza joked about his hard-on: after all, it was HotDog. But coming out of the slingshot, the planetoid a huge shadow behind her, and finding herself smack in the middle of a Cylon patrol: that was a rush of a different kind, the kind that twisted her stomach into small, tight tangles. It made her mad.

"Get yourselves home," she snarled into the helmet mic, yanking on the stick to drag her ship back and between the training flight and the enemy.

The frantic, near panicking arguments washed over her as she rapidly armed her wing-missiles and the major guns, not looking down to check; the actions were automatic by now. Instead, she was counting. How many were there? Seven?

Eight?

There were far too many to risk keeping her eyes on both the nuggets and the raiders. There wasn't an option. She thumbed her safeties off, glanced down at _dradis_ to see their signatures, still hovering close. Get back to the fleet, that s an order. Tell Galactica we have company.

"But- "

"Shut the _frak_ up and get out of here. Pedals to the floor, children. Frak!" The first shot from the closest opponent sliced by her and Starbuck let her instincts take over, the tide of too many frustrations and angers and fears flooding her with useful purpose. These kids weren't going to die today, and neither was she. "Tell Apollo to get his CAP out here. Go!"

Three of them went. One of them didn't. And while it was one more thing to be angry about, there was part of her that was proud, too. If she screwed up, if she did die today, she'd at least made one pilot after her own heart.

Lee would recognize that, too.

-0-0-

_Would really appreciate feedback if you're willing to hit the little button just down here: even if it's just to let me know you liked it, or didn't! Thanks!_


	7. Chapter 7

**Title**:** Eris and Aurora, 7/7**  
**Length**: 8655 words this chapter  
**Rating**: **M**. Sexual References, Language, Violence.  
**Characters**: Kara/Lee. Adama.  
**Genre**: Drama, Angst, Romance.

* * *

_**-3 years. Officer's quarters, Sparta Base Barracks**_.

She bit her lip, fought the desire to pour herself a glass of nectar. It'd dull the edges of her nerves, but if things got out of hand when he arrived, then the last thing either of them could afford was to add alcohol to the mix.

He was going to be angry. She hated that, hated that it terrified her. The whole of her life, she d been terrified of the people closest to her for one reason or another, and if she had to fear him, wonder about him, for the life together they were supposed to commit to in just a few months time, then she d rather have the fight out. Get it over with. _Break your heart, save your soul_, as momma had always told her.

This certainly wasn't what she'd planned for this particular night. The clothes she'd bought, the table she'd booked at a good place in Sparta City, the smile and the pride she'd been practicing in hope for so long, they were all for the first time Lieutenant Thrace and Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Adama could finally, openly, step out together. No longer student and teacher, but as equal as they d ever get: it was supposed to be beautiful.

Now she'd just be happy to get through tonight with a whole skin, let alone a whole heart.

The fear was insidious, and had been building all day, ever since the teeth-gritting moment when Zak climbed out of his sim-suite and looked directly across the control panel at her, and gave her that grin, that hard-eyed _triumphant_ grin. _'All clear, sir?_' he'd chirped, as though he'd just aced the simulation instead of scraping through the first two scenarios and outright botching the harder tests. It was the same grin he'd used when she woke up beside him that first time, that he used when he managed to bluff her at the card table, the same grin he flashed at Lee whenever the three of them were together and Zak had a chance to flaunt a little public affection.

The result was clear, clearly a failure, of course. It had been the same problem as it had always been, the same problem she'd worked with him for months to correct, that she'd thought they'd finally managed to control: he was too slow. And to make up for it, he reacted too strongly. He was logical, and when it came to straight flying, he was fine. But his maneuvers were heavy, over-corrected, overreacted, and anxiety just made it worse.

He couldn't fly a Viper in combat. He must have known it, and now she had to acknowledge it to him.

_But that grin._

Kara didn't know why, after all this time, it suddenly occurred to her that this might be the only reason they were together. They'd been together since well before he was in her class, but she'd always been an instructor, the instructor that handled the final part of basic training for Viper pilots. He knew it.

And when he tossed her that grin, that _I've-got-you-now_, victorious smile, she felt a shift in her surroundings, and became aware of just what kind of a corner he'd managed to back her into. Only one way out, that smile told her, and that was Zak's way. She could only hope that it was just pre-nuptial jitters, inbuilt suspicion, the part of her that could never quite _trust_ in being loved, or her secret, secret doubts and the way she thought of Lee. Not the truth, please, not the truth.

She'd know soon enough. If Zak loved her, they'd get past this. Even if he'd started out with her because she could help him, that didn't mean things hadn't changed.

What it all came down to was that if he stayed with her now, then whatever reason he'd had to come after her so determinedly, to shrug off her initial refusals, ignore her foibles, was nothing to do with his wings. And if he didn't...

It felt like such a traitorous thing to do, to refuse her endorsement on his final check flight. It felt like tearing something out of her chest, but if the only alternative was to pass him, to live with the fear of the consequences, and her own doubts, forever, then she couldn't do it. Not when every flight he ever took from this day on could mean disaster. Nothing was irreparable. Zak would hate it, of course, but she had endorsed him for Raptor school, and for the intra-atmo craft where his heavy-handedness would nearly be an asset. If none of those was good enough, he had a six-month reroute, and then he could run his final year again. He could even request a retest, though with his scores it wasn't likely he d get one.

Apollo would back her up, help her get Zak through this.. He'd be there every step, encouraging his brother, guarding his six. That was one thing she could trust in, that Lee Adama would understand. He was all about the ideal, the principle, and even if she usually waved off such considerations, she knew she was doing the right thing.

No matter how wrong it felt.

Later, when the nectar bottle was shards in a puddle and her life was in tatters and Zak was gone, with the last of his venomous, vicious accusations still ringing in the air, she picked up the phone in one shaking, bleeding hand and thought about calling Lee.

There didn't seem to be any point, though. Zak was done with her, and that meant Lee wasn't going to be her brother. Lee was too loyal, too caring a brother to stand with her against him. Wasn't that the way families were supposed to be? She wondered if she should feel less of a sting for the thought of losing Lee than she did. It was just another unvoiced treachery, another to add to the list Zak had hurled at her.

She dropped the phone in the pool of spilled liquor and broken glass, and paused, seeing the glint of silver in the puddle: the silver spiral ring she d given him, the one he'd thrown down. Gulping breath through a throat gone painfully tight, she fished it up, slid it onto a finger, but it was too large and slipped away, even though the knuckles were swollen and bruised where they'd connected with his jaw. She tried another and another finger, eventually sliding it over her thumb, where it rested chill against the skin, a weight unaccustomed.

And then she hunted up the other bottles, as many as she had stashed about her quarters, and drank until she could sleep. _Break your heart, save your soul,_ but she still felt damned.

**+one month, six days. 1425hrs, Commander's Ready Room, CIC deck, _Galactica_**

Marker flicked through the nose-camera pictures yet again, marveling; the cadet's bird had picked up almost all of the combat, and combined with the other retrieved data from the wreck of the kid's ship, they knew almost everything that had happened.

Starbuck had always been credited as a hot pilot, and since their flight from the Colonies commenced, she'd done nothing to dent that reputation. But what had happened here was beyond anything he'd even heard of. One pilot, even with a little unexpected assistance from a rook with more balls than brains, did not go up against eight Raiders and expect to live, but she'd done it, killed six of the enemy, saved her rook's overconfident ass at least once before she took a hit.

It wasn't so much miraculous as it was typical; from the beginning, he'd known that the silent, bruised and belligerent pilot that had been transferred to his command had a habit of pulling off the unlikely, and as Colonel Marroll had come to know her better, he'd figured that the then-Lieutenant Kara Thrace was someone who refused to give in without a fight, even up against the impossible.

Even up against Commander William Adama.

The old conundrum of irresistible force and immovable object had come to mind a lot in the past few weeks. He'd had to watch his former chief pilot swim upstream against the current of the Commander's resentment, had to watch and speculate and prepare to catch her as best he could.

"Seven to one. Hard to believe," Colonel Tigh muttered from his corner of the table, his own copies of the 'graphs fanned out before him.

"So say we all," Rhys agreed, more out of diplomacy than doubt. "But it's all right there."

"The kid says she was still maneuvering, but I'd guess that didn't last long. From that last broadside shot it looks like she had no starboard control at all. But she's fighting it, which means she was still conscious and able to try."

"She'd punch out," the CAG agreed, his anxiety obvious, though, like his old man, it wasn't from his face, which was unreadable. The young captain was clenching his fists against the ops table, though. "Starbuck volunteered for extra E-P-R training and took the cadets through it herself while she was teaching; she loves the chute courses. If the bird wasn't responding, she wouldn't hesitate to pop it."

Most trained pilots loathed it; Colonial Fleet combat pilots rarely had to work intra-atmo, and gravity was a whole 'nother issue to a pilot trained for the forgiving nature of space. Most managed to undergo the training, but anyone who helmed an attack ship or commanded pilots knew very well that for every pilot who could successfully punch out, there was one who left it too late, too long, dreaded the drop too much. It was a side-effect of being pilots who were taught - first and worst - to fly in space.

"So she's down there." Commander Adama pointed at the scans, at the red moon, and then his fist slowly closed. "Your search teams are wasted outside the gravity well, Captain."

"I agree, sir. I've laid out a standard search -"

"Do what you need to do. Get everyone out there."

The moment's silence could have been relief or surprise, but Apollo didn't linger for long. "Yes, sir."

"Dismissed, gentlemen."

Tigh got up, followed the CAG out of the room, but Marroll found himself lingering.

"Something on your mind, Marker?"

"You could say that, sir."

"I don't leave people behind any more than you do."

"I don't doubt it, Commander. I expected nothing less. But I don't think you're as cold about this as you're trying to make me think you are."

Adama's shoulders hunched. "I'm not. I'm tired and angry and I don't have time to question my past actions, but I'm doing it all the same."

"Need to hash it out? I can't promise to agree with you, but -"

The older man huffed a sort of a laugh, rough and regretful. "We don't have time for that either, you know. But I'll ask a question, if you don't mind."

"Of course."

"Did Th- did Starbuck ever discuss with you why she left Sparta? Did you ask her?"

Rhys examined the man across the table from him, saw the real question in his eyes. "Yes, of course. She was a highly recommended pilot and a commended instructor at a prestigious post, and she came to me halfway through a training cycle with nothing in her jacket but a 'transfer on request' zero-six slip and a sheaf of recent misdemeanors. I didn't want a headcase or a spoiled brat, no matter who was backing her. I asked, and she told me. Plain facts: she'd been involved with a student, and there had been a conflict of interest inquiry, and the cadet had been killed a few months before."

"Did she include me in her explanation?"

"No. I figured there had to be more than that; she wasn't in a good way when she came aboard, but it made no difference to her flying and she was exemplary on duty. I eventually called up Deak Trevis and asked him what he thought, and he gave me a few more details. He was worried for her. She'd requested transfer against his wishes, and from what he said, I figured that was because she didn't want him to have to deal with you over her mistakes."

"I wondered about that."

"Permission to speak freely, Commander?"

"I thought we were. Of course."

"I know, but I'm not going to pull my punches here, Husker. You did what you figured was right for your kid, and I can't blame a man for that. But your kid was only half this story. Kara Thrace screwed up, but so did your son. And so did you."

Adama said nothing, and _Aurora_'s commander gritted his teeth and went on. "I said once that your kid made a man's choices, and that's still the truth. You believed him and you made your decisions according to that. But let me ask you a question: if that kid had been just a kid, and not your son, who would you have believed?"

More silence. Marroll breathed out, flexed his hands against the edge of the ops desk.

"She wanted him to pass," the words weren't angry or reluctant; Adama sounded surprised. "She was still his fiancee during the flight test. She tried to get him through. She lied under oath to give him the opportunity to test again, risked her wings for him. I asked her, this morning, about the hearing. She told me."

"Nobody would want to believe their kid would use someone like that. Nobody could blame you for doubting."

"My other son does." There was another weary crackle of laughter, and a hint of wry amusement. "Lee and I always were at opposite ends of the same scale."

"I don't know about Apollo, sir, but I know Starbuck. And where she stands is pretty firmly in the middle."

Adama straightened, nodded, gestured at the scattered footage-stills, showing the battle fought by the red moon. "Eight to two," he murmured, traced a finger over the ragged wing of Starbuck's viper. "She's one hell of a pilot."

"Yes, sir, she is."

"I hope we find her."

Rhys blinked, nodded. "So say we all."

**+one month, seven days; 0700hr SAR OPS session, Port flight deck, _Galactica_**

There was no ops table, and the CAG was unwilling to step more than one corridor away from the flight deck, so the LSO's office was crammed with the orbital and reconnaissance pictures, the scan results and the search pattern. Going was too slow, and even with their best estimates of where Starbuck's plane would have come down, with rotation and gravitation taken into account, the search area was too large to cover. But Lee was driven and with the pilots all backing him, willingly throwing themselves and their birds into the rust soup that was the moon's atmosphere, and with the angry twist of his own uncertainty and guilt thrown into the mix, _Galactica_'s commander wasn't about to call them away.

He'd search for any pilot, with the utmost of his resources. During his command, he'd never left a pilot behind with any doubt of their status. He had an obligation, no matter how conflicted he might be.

It was an excuse, and he knew it, but it might be the only way he could live with himself thereafter, to say he'd done his best, even if he could never put things right. Either way, chances were that Lee would never forgive him. Lee was focused on finding Thrace. Starbuck, Adama reminded himself, the woman both his sons called 'Kara', and both of them had said it with the same reverence, the same care.

Zak had said he needed her. Lee didn't, but then, he didn't need to.

He'd never had to say much, because there was never much to say, not between the two of them. So unlike, and so like. He'd never realized that, pouring affection and attention on the son who seemed to need them, and leaving the other, leaving Lee, to his silence. He'd respected the desire to do things his own way, he told himself. _That's crap,_ came the bitter response from a conscience newly woken with the realization of his failings. _That's such crap, Adama. Zak let you help him, and you liked being needed. That's the easy way to be a father_.

"I'd like to retask a couple of the Raptors, sir." His son's voice interrupted his musings. "They're wasted on radio support now that we have _Aurora_ up close to the moon; surely we can set them up at a sweep pattern, see if we can pick up traces of Starbuck's ship even if we can't find the beacon."

"That might do it. I'd run them at ten units above the hard-deck, get them to sweep for tylium and titanium, both show up hard on sensors and aren't natural to the atmosphere."

"Yes, sir. I'm thinking I'll run Boomer and Telemachus out as our recon and task the rest in Search. All of the birds are set up for retrieval, but only those two raptors are armed at the moment; they were on patrol when -"

The door slid open with an abrupt hiss, and seeing the salutes of the marine guard at the door, both men straightened from their charts. Laura Roslin, her dark red suit as crumpled as their uniforms and her expression as stern as his own, walked in, waving off her escort. The door slid shut while she stared at them.

"Commander Adama. Captain."

The president of the Colonies might only have been the last living remnant of a government, rather than a mandated president, and the head of state of less than fifty thousand people with no actual state, but Adama could not deny that she had presence. He had never quibbled with her legal authority, or denied that she was efficient and at least mostly cooperative as far as the military prerogatives were concerned, but he didn't like the rather proprietary interest she took in _Galactica,_ didn't like at all the tendency she had to make his soldier's choices into issues of politics. And he didn't like her interest - that was not quite to say _interference_, but close - in matters of how he ran his ship.

Not when he didn't know at all which sides of the issues she'd come down on.

"Madam President," Adama answered after a moment; the president didn't look particularly pleased to see him, and he had to admit, he wasn't particularly pleased to see her, either. He'd hoped she'd be willing to keep her nose out of this. "I'm sorry, I didn't know you were coming aboard, or I'd have-"

"It doesn't matter, Commander, I know you have more important concerns today than protocol. As do I, which is why I'll come straight to the point. Why are we still here? I know that each and every one of our pilots is deserving of the best we can give them in terms of search and rescue, but it's been nearly two days. Our fuel reserves are not limitless. You need to call it off, as soon as possible. One life, no matter how valuable, is not worth the rest of this fleet."

"Normally I would agree with you, ma'am. But in this case, we're in no danger. We have time yet. Search and Rescue is a right of all downed pilots, and an obligation I will not neglect."

"No danger? You've pulled the Combat Patrol in order to assist in the search. You have _Aurora_, our best reconnaissance platform, flying dangerously close to the gravitational fields of this moon, and with half our fighter-ships out of commission from flying your search pattern, I don't exactly see in what way you're making us safe."

Lee interrupted. "Forgive me, Madam President, but they're not out of commission. The repairs to each ship take only a few minutes after each flight."

"Semantics, Captain Apollo. If the Cylons attacked right now, how many vipers could you launch?"

Lee said nothing. Adama saw the frustration and anger in his son, and the pain underneath it. "Madam President, I can see you have issues with our logic, and in your place, I might agree. But if I call this search off now, I tell every pilot that remains on my deck that someday they might be left behind also. Without a definite threat to the fleet, I want to continue this search, because if it were me, if it had been me, or my son -"

"It is not. And frankly, Commander, I'm afraid that it wouldn't matter if it were." She transferred a considering gaze to Lee and then back to him. "You're making a personal issue out of this, Commander. I can understand why, and don't think for a second that I blame you for wanting to save this woman. But regardless of who she is, what she does in this fleet or why you - either of you - care, you can't risk the lives of fifty thousand other people for hers. Call off this search and get us out of here."

Lee, at the end of the table, was staring at him. The expression in his eyes was strained, fearful and questioning, but then the light seemed to go out of them, and his son's posture, buoyed by the full search and the support he'd unexpectedly received thus far, lost it's hope. Without it, the CAG's face looked haggard, and Adama felt the same fear, the same instinct to rescue, to fix things no-matter-what that he'd felt so often as a father, whenever Zak needed him, whenever his boy had asked for his help.

All that time, his older boy's determination to earn every inch, every scrap of praise, had looked like rebellion. Was he so old he'd forgotten that once, a long time ago, he'd been just as determined never to ask for help? But he could see it this time.

Lee needed his help. Lee had never asked for his help, and wouldn't now, but he _needed_ it, all the same. And Adama could make that happen.

"No."

**+one month, seven days. 1303hr. AB15512J "The Red Moon". Air reserves +133 minutes**

Her leg was being a prize bitch.

She didn't like it, of course - not even her early education had made her a masochist - but she wasn't going to whine about it, not even to herself. It was almost useful, because physical pain kept her temper honed, and that kept her moving, and given her situation, it was about all there was that kept her moving. Hope was never particularly useful, and she was fairly sure that after a token gesture at SAR, Adama would move his ship and the fleet away without her. The only thing she could do was speculate that _Aurora_ was still up there, that Rhys Marroll had used that persuasive way he had and got himself and his ship tasked with SAR.

Still, that was a hope, too, and a slim one. In between her aching leg and her temper and her determination not to just sit down and wait for death, she was too busy to think too much about other things. Lee, in particular.

'Too much' was a relative term, of course. She couldn't help but think about him as she doggedly walked, heading always uphill, following the ridge, trying to keep her footing in the gale. Couldn't help but see his face, that way his jaw tightened and worked when he was angry, how his eyes crinkled when he smiled, how his pulse beat fast in the tender cusp of his throat while they frakked, long and slow and so sweetly. Stories about seeing the scenes of your life flashing before your eyes in death might not be so bad, if all the scenery was like that, she mused, and then went back to cursing her knee for another dozen steps.

Lee's wasn't the only face she saw, unfortunately. But when his old man, eyes as blue but much icier, face as strong but craggy with fury and scars and unexpected questions, started to join the recollections, she deliberately set her foot down a little harder and let the pain blot out the imagery.

Thinking too much was as painful as her knee, anyway.

Ten more steps, and she seemed to be on the top of the outcropping, and she leaned back against a rock for traction against the wind. She had to brush dust off her wrist gauge to check her air then wished she hadn't bothered. Gods, she was stupid, passing out like that. 'Chute drills in flight school had always been something she enjoyed, and she'd never blacked out before. _Hours_ wasted while she lay on her back, napping her air away! Exhaustion, shock, pain, whatever, were only excuses. And wedging up against this rock wasn't getting her anywhere, either.

Two hours left. A while back, she thought she'd heard a flyover, but she'd seen nothing but dust and more blowing dust, and while she seemed to be as far above this plateau as she could get, there'd been nothing since, no engine noise, no break in the stream of bloody-tinted cloud above her. "Gods," she said quietly, "I could use a little help here."

It was sincerely meant, far more so than her angry, pain-prompted and half-hearted asides of the last ten hours. Despite everything, she actually _did_ have faith, but it was a faith tempered by long pragmatism. The scriptures she'd known since she was a child had spelled it out clearly: Gods didn't save you. They only ever gave you the means to save yourself. But right at that moment, Kara didn't see any way to get herself off that rock, short of growing wings.

She turned, meaning to follow the extent of the ridge, hoping that beyond the veil of dust there was another hill. Ten minutes she climbed, step by painful step, and found herself at the edge of a crater of some kind. The grit skidded under her boots, and she overbalanced and slipped down, the hillside giving way before her, dust kicked up against her visor glass, leaving her blind and sliding and her knee wrenching until she landed, furious and in agony, in the shadow of the curve of a massive metal wing.

"Thank you," she said then, as she let her eyes play over the cracked viewport, the otherwise unmarked chassis. "I mean that. _Thank you_, Lords."

**+one month, seven days. 1442hr, _Galactica_ Port Flight pod.**

The old man was on the flight deck, he could tell - the slight hush, the way the movements he caught in his peripheral rippled, people stepping aside, people saluting, people's heads turning - and Lee wasn't really sure he was ready for that. And he didn't have time, not then, not right now because he needed to get his godsdamned deck in order. Because they needed to find Starbuck, find her and bring her home.

But they weren't going to.

"Lee?"

It wasn't 'Captain' or 'CAG', either of which would have been normal, and it sent the PO2 and the flight schedules skittering away, which left Lee without the camouflage and trappings of his job. This was his _dad_, on the flight deck. This was someone he sometimes felt he barely even knew. "Yes, sir?"

A wry expression crossed the old man's face. "I know you're busy. But -"

"But this isn't the time or place for heart to hearts, exactly," Lee couldn't quite keep the bitterness out of his tone. "I have to get the deck ready for jump."

"The crew are on it. Please, Lee -"

Lee didn't want to hear pleas. His own went unanswered, after all. "Don't worry. I don't blame you this time."

"Perhaps you should. I know this won't be ... easy -" The words might have been an apology, but they dried up. "I'm sorry, son."

Lee grit his teeth to stop the flood, though he wasn't sure if it would be accusations or tears or nausea when it came, or all three. "We stayed as long as we could. I get that," he gritted. "I know we have to move on. It's the logical -"

Gods. The air in his chest seemed to vanish: _logical_, to leave Kara behind, not knowing if she was gone already or if she'd choke down there alone, waiting for him to find her. One of the philosophical reasons for fraternization codes was to spare him _this_, spare his old man, spare the ship the agony of abandoning their own, but even if he'd never touched her, even if he'd just stayed at a safe distance and been professional, this would still feel like he was leaving the best part of himself behind.

Roslin's voice echoed in his memory, the final, cold command given ten minutes since: _clear your heads_. Well, he couldn't, but he could pretend. He had a lot of practice at that.

"It might be. But it's not right, all the same." The commander's hand on his shoulder, his father's hand. "Lee..."

Two days ago, this man hated Kara, Starbuck, Captain Thrace; two days ago he'd hated Lee almost as much, because Lee _didn't_. The sympathy should have felt false, but it wasn't, the anguish in the set of his old man's eyes felt like a reflection of his own. The dichotomy twisted in his chest. "Will you tell me," he heard himself ask, and couldn't quite regret the shaking in his voice, "why we stayed? It wasn't for Kara. It wasn't for Starbuck. Was it for Zak? Was it _because_ of Zak?"

The hand on his shoulder tightened. "It was for you."

Lee nodded, turning away, not wanting the burning in his eyes to become tears for too many reasons. "Okay."

His father nodded back, and he started to say something that was drowned out by the harsh shrieking of a contact alert. "Frak."

The Commander was already at the comset, and Lee cast his eyes across the deck: it was his own bird at Alert, with Hawkins' 'seven', and a 'two' from _Aurora_'s complement being set up in the ready zone. Lee tugged the closures on his flight suit shut, caught the helmet tossed towards him by a crew-spec. "Load me up, chief," he yelled on his way up the ladder, and fit himself into the seat, adjusting his helmet and the air-intakes, the metal seal-collar that secured both making an audible click as it locked. "LSO, Apollo," he tested his coms, "check my signal and tell me what the frak's going on?"

"Signal's good, Apollo, looks like you're clear for launch. And we've got a Cylon signal, looks like it's coming up out of the moon's shadow. No clear read on it, not sure how many there are. Moving too fast for a shuttle or transport."

"Raiders then. I'm on it. Get me out there."

"Roger, Apollo, you are clear for launch."

He engaged thusters, felt the cat kick in, felt the force punch him backwards in his seat. One couldn't breathe for the duration of launch; the lungs didn't inflate, and the pressure of trying could crack ribs. It didn't bother him. It had never bothered him, but this time he felt it even less, because it already hurt to draw breath. Especially knowing that Kara - Kara, _ohgods,_ was running out of air herself.

He waited for the signal from his wing, the other alert Viper, to appear on dradis, and it didn't, and it felt all of a piece, the massive _wrongness_ of this life they were living and the destruction of the Colonies becoming all the more intimate: he'd lost the last bit of living he'd been able to hold, lost it on this red rotted moon. What could he expect of reality now, but that he'd be out here solo, facing down whatever the Fates would send?

His self-pity was nearly as nauseating as his grief.

The raider was alone, too; the incongruity should have stood out. More things _Lee-the-man c_ouldn't understand and didn't have time to contemplate. _Apollo-the-pilot_ just turned his ship, flicked the thumb-guard off his munitions array and lined up a shot.

Missed.

The raider skittered out of reach, an unfamiliar stutter in it's flight; he thrust forward, pedal down, dumping more fuel into his engines. Range was good again and he grabbed at it, fingers of twenty-mil fire lancing out, but again the target skipped, twisted, writhed out of reach. Disappeared.

He was angry, he was afraid. He was looking to kill something, anything, because if he didn't -

"Frak. Slippery bastard," he growled, inverting to check his blinds. A glimpse of gunmetal grey caught his attention: there. Right there, the sinister shadow, hovering in his wake. Why wasn't it firing? Didn't it want to kill him, just as much as he wanted to kill it?

Once more, he set up the shot, traced it forwards, wanting to _feel_ that impact, that explosion. Once more it slipped away, strange shudders and uneven flight vanishing into the shadows again. Gone.

Above him. Then it moved, turned over. Presented it's belly for the kill.

Star -

"It's Kara", he breathed. Disbelieving, happy, filling up with what seemed like the first real breath in two days. "_Kara_," he repeated, louder, for everyone listening as well as for himself. "It's Starbuck. It's written under the wing."

**+one month, seven days. 2122hr, _Galactica_ Sickbay.**

The antiseptic smell of sickbay and the rustle-clink of curtains weren't the things that woke her, weren't the senses that came alive first. It wasn't what she could see, either, because she couldn't see anything, her eyes gummy with sleep and sedatives. And it wasn't pain, despite the lingering pulse-throb of her knee. It was the pulsing brush of warm air, someone's breath, on the back of her hand, the one her dulled nerves eventually told her was wound in someone else's fingers.

Lee's, of course. He'd fallen asleep sitting beside her infirmary bed, his head fallen forwards onto his free arm and then to the blanket beside her thigh, their hands linked in front of his face. Lee, Apollo, Captain Adama, sentimental goofball with the adorable smile and the universe's fastest blush. She rubbed her right hand - carefully, avoiding the tubes and needles attached - across her eyes to try and see him better.

He was deeply asleep, despite being bent and cramped into his plastic-chair-bed-edge configuration, but his tanks and BDUs were clean and his cheeks well-shaved. He looked a hundred times better than he'd looked, stuttering and smiling and damn near as loopy on sheer relief as she was, beside her stretcher on the hangar-deck, however long ago that was. He'd looked pretty damn beautiful to her then, all the same, wrinkled nose, sweat and stubble and all, desperate to kiss her - she knew that look by now - and worried and happy all at the same time.

She'd wanted to kiss him, too, protocols be frakked. The medics prevented that. And she wouldn't wake him to do it now, but she smiled, and sent another prayer to the gods, relief and gratitude all the more heartfelt for the fact of Lee.

The rustle-clink of curtain-rings on metal rods was louder now. At the end of her bed, in fact: the noise didn't wake her CAG, though. Nor did the involuntary way her muscles tightened and her fingers clenched under his. Kara flicked a concerned glance at Sleeping Beauty for the near miss, then looked back to her new, and not nearly so welcome, guest.

"Don't worry, Captain. The good doctor forced a sedative down his throat an hour ago, with my approval. He'll sleep a while yet."

"You didn't order him to his bunk, sir?"

Adama half-grimaced. "It doesn't do me much good to issue orders I know won't be obeyed, Captain. I'll settle for what I can get, at least where Lee is concerned. He agreed to a shower, food, and the drugs as long as he could stay here. I tried to insist on another bed, too, but apparently that was a step too far."

The wryness in his expression softened the harsher lines of his mouth, giving his smile a hint of the charm she recognized so well in his sons. "He's out now," she offered. "Maybe we can bring in a cot, at least? He'll be cramped up for weeks if he spends much longer sleeping that way."

"That might work," the old man nodded. "I'll see to it."

Silence was thick, for a few moments; Kara had no idea what to think. Lee's dad - _Zak's dad_ - wasn't glaring, wasn't raving, hadn't hauled his son off her and was now standing at the end of her bed, his eyes questioning, but steady. She returned the look, ignoring the way her tension made the throb of her knee burn. "Sir?"

"May I sit, Captain?" he asked, gesturing at the chair on the other side of the bed. More disturbed by the courtesy than the burgeoning ache in her leg, she nodded, and he lifted the seat into place, lowered himself into it. He exhaled, loud enough for her to hear over the little noises of sickbay, and then leaned in, his hands lightly locked together on the edge of her bed.

"I will admit that I don't know you very well, Captain Thrace, but I think you are as impatient with small talk as I am, so I'll get to the point. I might have been wrong, but it'll take me a while to learn to trust you as an officer. I'm aware of just how much I've misjudged you, how unfairly I've treated you. I wish that knowing those things would make that trust easy, but it doesn't."

"You had your reasons," Kara muttered, her hand still trapped in Lee's. She brushed a thumb along the side of his palm. "Believe me, I can understand that much."

"I thought they were good ones."

"The best," she replied. "And the worst."

"I can't make it up to you," the old man went on, after another silence. "Not what I did, not what my son - what Zak did to you. Apologies don't mean a lot, except as an admission of how much both of us frakked up."

Kara felt her own half-bitter grin twist into place. "You Adamas weren't the only ones. I had my share."

"Best and worst reasons," the commander echoed. Then he shook his head. "We were all wrong. But the final responsibility is mine. No, I know what you're thinking, Starbuck -" and Kara blinked, to hear the call-sign used instead of the rank or surname. Almost as though to an equal. "Zak let me believe what he wanted me to believe. And I did what I did because I believed just that, that you betrayed him. But the fact that he went that far, that he tried to use you like he did, that he would even try? That's my failure."

"You must have done a lot right, though," she said, let her eyes slip sideways to Lee's rumpled hair where it brushed the blankets. "And Zak, too. I don't know why he - why things happened the way they did, but I do know that he was an amazing person. There were just things he wanted too much to wait for."

Adama nodded.

They looked at each other, frankly, without rancor.

"What happens now?" she asked, turning back to look at the other, silent part of this conversation; his face was bent away from her, pillowed on his left forearm, but she could see the sharp arch of his cheekbone, the curve of his neck, the tight whorl of his ear. Her leg throbbed, and her uncertainty scratched at her, and he was the closest thing to comforting she had.

"Well, Cottle says you're going to be off the flight line for a while -"

"Frak," Kara closed her eyes. She'd thought that was the case, but after everything that had happened - was happening - she'd indulged in a little more hope all the same.

"- And that leaves me with a problem. I've got to have a flight instructor, and we can't afford any more fuel for training flights, so Marroll and I have cooked up a temporary solution. Until you're back on deck, that is."

"Marker's always full of bright ideas."

"I think you'll like this one. I'm going to reassign you to _Aurora_."

Kara didn't say anything, didn't think she could bear to comment. A week ago, being out of the Commander's immediate reach would have been a relief, but since then, she'd been run ragged, shot down, stranded on a chunk of really ugly rock and nearly died, and - guilt trips and old wounds and frat regs aside - she didn't want to give up the one thing that had made her dogged determination not to die make sense. She tightened her fingers around the sleeping reason's hand.

Adama glanced at the linkage, went on, his face unreadable. "Marker's engineers have the basic sims consoles aboard _Aurora_ back online, and Gaeta and his crew have updated the programs to reflect ... current circumstances. You'll take your training squadron with you, and you'll serve as acting XO for Marroll when you're not teaching."

"Sir."

"And you'll do it from a comfortable seat, too. Cottle says you're off that leg until he says otherwise."

"Great."

"And I'll expect you to keep the CAG fully informed, of course."

"Of course. Sir."

"When you're back in the cockpit yourself, we'll set it up so you're nominally under Rhys's command, even though you'll be flying off this deck. Once your nuggets are qualified, we'll re-task them as the _Aurora_ squadron, keep the command structure solid."

The intention couldn't be what she was reading into it, could it? He couldn't be tacitly paving the way for -

"Give me time, Starbuck. I don't trust you yet, but I can learn. As you said: I have the best of reasons." The old man stood, pressed his hand against her shoulder. "Feel better." Then he moved to the end of the bed, rounded it only just so far that he could touch his sleeping son's hair, then disappeared through the gap in the curtains.

Kara could have sworn she felt the universe shift.

"Wow," said a sleepy voice from the blanket at her hip. "Did he just - no. I must be dreaming."

"Frak, Lee. How long have you been awake?"

"I am? Wow. Not long, I guess. Long enough to know we'll be on different ships for a little while."

"This is okay with you?"

"None of this is okay, exactly. You're hurt. My dad's actually being my dad and not my superior officer, and if I read any of this correctly, the Commander's putting you back in the command structure nominally under someone else's orders. Which means -"

"No fraternization. Technically, at least."

Lee nodded, rubbed his neck.

"And it's not okay?"

Another nod, and a short, tired laugh. "The different ships thing? No. Not at all. If the frat regs had meant anything much to me, we wouldn't be here. And my dad being ... well, my dad - frak, Kara. I don't know. It's been a long time since I could think of him as just... dad." Lee closed his eyes, tilted his head up at the ceiling. "Not really sure how to... process."

"Me either."

They sat, silent for little while, not looking at each other.

"It's all he can offer, though, you know," Kara said, after a moment. "I'm... grateful."

"What?"

"Lee. He's saying it's okay. That we're okay. That he's not going to fight us over this, that he's not going to hate you because of me. I - that's more than I'd ever expected."

"You want his approval?"

"Not for me, Lee. Just for you."

"He says he can learn to trust. I'm not sure - I don't know. I think he'll try. I don't know if I can learn, either."

Silence stretched out between them for a moment, but it didn't feel like distance. Just quiet, just silence. Just two people who, for the first time, let go of their guilt just enough, just enough to hold onto each other instead. Kara laced her fingers through the hand holding them.

"You were trying pretty well to kill me, back there," she pointed out.

"It's occasionally an urge, with you," he shot back. "Admittedly, I'm glad I didn't."

"Not going to tell me you weren't trying that hard?"

"Nope."

"Nope?"

"I just spent the last thirty-six hours trying to save you, Thrace. I was busting my ass to kill Cylons after that, and you -" He shook his head. The miraculous nature of her return to the fleet had already become pilot legend. "Must say I'm glad I didn't kill you this time, though."

"Well, let me know when the urge comes up again. Have to say, that raider is a pretty sweet ride."

He laughed, but the look in his eyes was more about urges, and rides, of another kind. "If I'm going to kill you - or you kill me, Starbuck - I can think of better ways."

**+two months, two days. 1700hrs, Starboard Pod, the Museum deck, _Galactica_**

Commander William Adama accepted the salutes of the twelve new Colonial Fleet pilots, returning it with a smile that was probably two-thirds relief. Cylon contacts had been rare since the tylium mission but frequent enough to keep his pilots on edge. Twelve new sticks to call on would give enough room in the roster to let people start to recoup.

One by one, the kids - _they looked so young_! - filed past their CAG to accept their wings and Viper insignia. One by one, they shook his hand and stepped up to their Instructor, who pinned them on. Each one got a smile and a few words from both Starbuck and Apollo. Each one stood straighter for it.

Bill Adama still walked cautiously around Captain Thrace. He'd been briefed by her a few times since she'd been posted back to _Aurora_ a month before; each time, their interaction seemed to ease: a little here, a word there. They'd discussed mutual friends in the Caprica City Viper School, discovered the PT officer who'd kicked her ass in basic had a liking for the same ridiculous '_nothing but the rain_' jody that he'd suffered through in his own basic training, thirty years before. They had a mutual but silent agreement to look after Lee.

He'd never be quite comfortable with her, he knew. Whether that was the weight of a guilty conscience, or the scars of a two-year battle not quite yet healed, he wasn't sure. But he was sure, now, watching the new Buck Squadron take their places in the ranks of pilots mustered in _Galactica_'s hanger bay, that it was worth it, worth the regret, worth the constant reminder of old wounds, to see these kids earn their wings, to see the numbers of his people - _Galactica_'s and _Aurora_'s - growing instead of thinning. To see Lee smiling at him, saluting with his new crew.

President Roslin smiled at him, too, a knowing, gentle kind of a smile that made him all too sure she knew what was going on in his head.

When the accolades were given and the ceremony concluded, a party atmosphere took over the hanger bay. The plex-glass window that sealed off the starboard pod would be coming down soon, and the flight deck re-opened, but for now it made for a hell of a place to celebrate. Adama wove through the crowd, seemingly meeting with every one of his crew not currently on duty.

Except his son, or Starbuck.

Wondering, he stepped back up on the podium, scanning the room. After a moment, he caught a glimpse of Lee, his arm firmly wrapped around Thrace's hip, heading for the main hatch back to the body of his ship. The two moved easily, though Thrace still limped a little, and while most of the pilots and crew stopped to greet them or heckle them or exchange a word or two, it was obvious to all that Starbuck and Apollo were leaving _together_, and everything that meant.

Rhys Marroll appeared at his elbow, offering a glass of something amber and rich. "Should I stop them, sir?"

The pair had paused for a moment, not far from the hatch, to talk to someone; the decorative lighting the Ministry of Education had put up in what was to be the centerpiece of their museum cast a brilliant glow around the two of them. In the halo of it, Bill Adama watched his son smile, smile and tug Kara Thrace a little closer. Kara threw her head back at something Lee said, and laughed.

"No," he replied at last, and took a deep, appreciative sip from his drink. "Let them go."

- fin -

* * *

_Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed it and will leave a quick message of feedback for me. This story was a long time in the writing for me, and I appreciate the reviews; I'm slowly restarting my writing engines and plan to work on a few well-loved pieces again now that this is done._

_Again, my thanks for stopping by!_

_Leda_


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